Words for Empty and Words for Full

Meditation on a false spring

57 Meditation on a false spring I’d kill to be as hopeful as the weather, seventy-three on February third, winter suddenly eager for the beach. It’s natural to love this, shirtsleeves and skin, the eave-ice of just a week ago gone, as pole-ice melts into the generosity of ocean, into the vast wave and salt you could taste if you kissed my lips, my blood. Natural because who feels the broken Earth? I feel sunlight, a breeze on skin and by the touch of looking, a breeze in the spasms of an oak’s zombie leaves, dead but hanging on. Who feels carbon load? Change in albedo? A rise in sea level in Galveston and decides, I will shoot my car? We feel happy and hungry and horny and other things that begin with h, small and stupid and guilty, tired and afraid and pleased, we feel what’s near and intimate: not “seventy-three degrees” but how sexual the touching air is without parkas. Small hicok pages i-120.indd 57 1/7/10 3:23 PM 58 things. Like when I found a minute-hand in gravel when I was nine and walking nowhere, and kept it without sorrow for the watch, not just without sorrow but knowing it took a death for me to have this treasure, this “hand” in my hand, pointing timelessly in my pocket for weeks until it was washed away in the wash: this is how the mind works, is this how the mind works: locally, on a scale of pleasure? I keep coming back to this in the context of violence—thirty-three shot here, hundreds of thousands in Iraq, billions since ever—how the one meets and fits or doesn’t into the many, the single mind melds or grinds against the urmind , I’ve tried to write my way to understanding on a computer that connects to a grid, and that grid to a grid, and that grid to systems no one human can think, let alone feel, to fit my mind to that disembodied mind, to the vast wish and oops and intelligence and war that is the all of which I am part and example. Get hicok pages i-120.indd 58 1/7/10 3:23 PM 59 real: not going to happen. So how hope or why hope, what is hope, I want hope. Seventy-three degrees and I’ll go running and think while running, I am the sensual beneficiary of carnage, I am the last man who will romp through these woods wearing factories on my feet, who ate a factory for breakfast, who has a factory at the end of everything he touches, I will believe that, I believe that, and that recycling is comedy, that turning off the lights is like wearing a pillow over my chest to battle, how hope, I have hope, somehow hope. Maybe it’s just bloodbreathrhythm, the physical optimism of the heart, sysand diastole, maybe it’s that I haven’t shot myself in the fucking head yet, as we have almost not. Maybe hope’s what I’ve long thought, a choice, a decision I have to make as often as my heart decides yes, until my heart decides no, and I mean the actual heart, the actual world, the actual gun I touch to ask myself to prove this is a day I want in on. hicok pages i-120.indd 59 1/7/10 3:23 PM ...