Words for Empty and Words for Full

Between us

60 Between us —for BN X is pregnant and wants to keep it but can’t, but can, but can’t. I should put it in quotes but that causes more problems than solves. I’m not the father, if you’re wondering. And she’s young but not crazy young, not overcome by the moment, first time, back of the car, isn’t beer wonderful young. So I think she wanted to get pregnant, since condoms exist, and convenience stores with their shelves for condoms, and either she could’ve bought them or he could’ve, together they could’ve engaged in prophylactic foreplay. This is certainly not an articulated desire, as it wasn’t for me and my girlfriend twenty-five years ago, when there were also condoms and we didn’t use them, also diaphragms. I never could have said to her that it was exciting to screw unwrapped, to feel the possibility of a child in rut, I barely recognized a wish that ran deep as protein chains, as lung and sinew. But when she got pregnant, the desire to not have the child was stronger, I should have been rip-sawed by my contradictions. The maple outside my writing window’s coming into leaf, it’s bud-sprinkled still but they’re opening, they’re not recognizable yet as leaves but palpably broadening and insistent. My girlfriend got pregnant twice and I learned the extent to which I’m no more sophisticated than this tree—one hicok pages i-120.indd 60 1/7/10 3:23 PM 61 abortion, one miscarriage—the extent to which the me I think of as me—word & memory me, love of rivers, tapioca, Tom Waits me—shadows wave me, thrust me, blood me, and what thrust me wants, what blood me needs is more, to make more, to extend, persist. The cock will trick us, the womb seduce us into serving the only reason they exist. This woman is Catholic and wants to be a mother. Anything she does now will be wrong, from her perspective: there’s no clear choice, no right choice. The child is not wanted, is not a child but a fetus, the fetus is wanted but not now. The fetus is not a child, is not a dream, though she dreams of rain in her womb. The pill is not one pill but two pills, the child is not a child but a fetus, is not wanted now, is wanted later, when it will be a different fetus not a child and then a child. She dreams of bones in her underwear drawer, fingers and jaw. She dreams of hyacinth flowing from the tap into cupped hands. She calls the father and says, what were we thinking? She calls the father and says nothing, breath on the line. I remember holding my girlfriend’s hand as she was made a woman no longer pregnant, as the jar was taken away by a nurse whose shoes squeaked. I thought of basketball, ten pairs of squeaking shoes, which made me think of horse, a game my girlfriend and I liked to play, which made me think of the roan she and I petted that summer hicok pages i-120.indd 61 1/7/10 3:23 PM 62 in a field we wanted to make love in. We didn’t have any rubbers and I said, does it matter, she said, I don’t know and kept kissing where she was kissing as I kept undoing everything but her skin. Later, she said she’d watched the horse watch as if we were grass in wind or birds that had landed near the life it had no idea it was living and felt that directness as her own, that she’d watched herself undistanced from . . . and finished the sentence with a waving of hands. hicok pages i-120.indd 62 1/7/10 3:23 PM ...