Bob Hicok
Repast and future
There was a woman in the restaurant, ordinary in dimension and
use of her fork, nothing sexually evocative about the procedures of
sustenance as she practiced them, and I with good company,
movie/book/art people, no great, out-to-sea lulls in the wording of
the night, she seemingly also quite happy with the gab and grub,
smiles essentially the menu. But at some point her forehead
announced itself as a startlingly wide plane. I wondered why I
hadn’t noticed it before, perhaps while deciding between the rice
and beef this-and-that or as one of the hes at my table said one of
the things about the temerity of public discourse that was said, as
if any of us are out there, tickling doorbells, asking mothers if
they see what’s become of freedom. What has become of freedom? All
week I’d been feeling the abandonment of my body by my hips, which
seem suddenly filled with rust, there’s grumbling at work like
sheared gears turning, and on TV, President Smirk telling me again
that my life is none of my business. And there it was, this vast,
slightly arching, almond brown pause at the top of her looking, this
space of no purpose other than to finish her face, to take her
countenance where it needed to go, to her hair, which turned around
and went the other way, touched her shoulders with its ten thousand
strands of midnight and fell across her back, as if her body were a
loop. Briefly I felt the responsibility to rise and kiss her
forehead, that if I did not, that was the end of it, the forests
would burn us down and toxins ooze into our sex and money realize it
doesn’t need us now that it has computers to play with. I didn’t,
didn’t drop my napkin into some resemblance of an iris, didn’t cross
the room carpeted with dull versions of rose, didn’t bring my lips
to her skin as softly as tulips rest against the moon, didn’t,
didn’t. So blame the Apocalypse on me, on my cowardice, my
unwillingness to trust what I knew, that she’d have felt cool as a
glass of ice water an hour after the ice has melted, and the water’s
reached over the top, to find the new world, to go about its
business of going, and it would have been the start of helping each
other, would have begun a dance across the restaurant, everyone
seeking some small patch of skin, some truth they’d come to believe,
and we would have all said yes to the dessert tray, yes we did save
room, yes coffee, yes we’ll come again, yes we’ll have a nice night,
yes there is no dearer child than yes.
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