your morning beauty
your eyes in civil twilight
the small of your back
your sweet sweet kindnesses
the love in your eyes
seen through my eyes
your quiet magic
votre chapeau blanc
votre chemise bleue
your willingness
your hopeful
your aching rocking rhythm
that flicker
that grin
that curling in you do when we entwine
your mysterious
your bravado
your bossy hands
your sense of non-direction
your funny accent
your holy holy heartbeat

this is just to say
i got your note.
really, willy. the last plums.
you knew i was saving them
and still you ate them. all of them.
so delicious and so cold.
fine. i hope they froze your tongue.
you have always been selfish.

~~~

this is just to answer your note:
i’m sorry you feel that way. I truly am sorry
about the plums. i didn’t expect you to take it so hard.
look, there’s a banana on the counter,
why not have that?
oh and by the way, did you ever stop to think
that perhaps the plums were a fucking
metaphor? maybe when i wrote ‘plums’
i meant eggs, or stones, ovaries, testacles.
maybe i was being all in your face
with the sexualization of fruits. seeds. nuts.
(nuts. get it?)

this is just to say that maybe i was gazing
upon those lovely luscious purple plums and couldn’t help being
transported to your breasts, your round, supple, smooth
lovely breasts, and i had to pop them
in my mouth, even though they were so cold
(unlike your impeccable breasts.)

maybe the plums were the first thing i’d eaten in days. would you still
begrudge me their flavour, their violet skins,
their rejuvenating coldness?

maybe i just needed to satisfy
an oral craving. maybe i just got home from a bender
and was in dire need of greasy eggs
and coca-cola with a slice of lemon but all i could find
to appease the raging hangover tongue was your silly little juicy
plums, all ‘c’mere, c’mere’ taunting me from the basket
in their deep cold purpleness.

this is just to say that maybe nothing else on this day
was ever going to quench
my thirst for you, my darling, not even
those lovely, luscious plums. but i had to try.

this is just to say
that i thought, i hoped
you would be mildly amused by my poem
my admittedly bratty apology, my little-boy, ‘please don’t hate me
but i ate your plums’ exercise in male privilege.
yes, i did eat your plums, because deep down i felt entitled.

this is just to say that, had i thought for one second you genuinely
would have a problem with me eating the damn plums, i wouldn’t have
eaten the damn plums. but my god, i ate them.
and they were good. they were possibly the best fucking plums i’ve ever had
with all their purpleness and coldness,
you know? they were awesome fucking plums, for christ’s sake,
and i would do it again, i would eat the damn plums again, even knowing
that it would freak you out and cause you to rethink
our life together. still
i would eat them all over again. so get off my back.

this is just to say that i am DREADFULLY sorry for eating
the plums but i think, all things considered, you probably
WANTED ME to eat the plums. why else would you have left them
right next to the cheese drawer? i swear, i will buy you
one thousand plums
if you will forgive me this indiscretion.

sincerely,
w.

~~~

this is just to say, william, that you are such an ass.
while you were going on and on about the damn fucking
marvelous plums, i was out licking the beautiful, most
perfect plums, not cold, tucked inside your
best friend’s trousers.

have a nice day.
sincerely,
sylvia

nov. 12, 2012
author’s note: the things you stumble upon
in old, forgotten notebooks.
i might go to hell for this abomination.
are there plums in hell?
probably not cold ones

Other Lives And Dimensions And Finally A Love Poem

My left hand will live longer than my right. The rivers
 of my palms tell me so.
Never argue with rivers. Never expect your lives to finish
 at the same time. I think
praying, I think clapping is how hands mourn. I think staying up and waiting
for paintings to sigh is science. In another dimension this 
is exactly what’s happening,
it’s what they write grants about: the chromodynamics of mournful Whistlers,
the audible sorrow and beta decay of Old Battersea Bridge. 
I like the idea
of different

 theres and elsewheres, an Idaho known for bluegrass,
a Bronx where people talk 
like violets smell. Perhaps I am somewhere patient,
somehow 
kind, perhaps in the nook 

of a cousin universe I’ve never defiled
or betrayed 
anyone. Here I have 
two hands and they are vanishing,
the hollow of your back 
to rest my cheek against, your voice and little else but my assiduous fear to cherish. 
My hands are webbed 
like the wind-torn work of a spider, like they squeezed something in the womb 

but couldn’t hang on. One of those other worlds 
or a life I felt
 passing through mine, or the ocean inside my mother’s belly 
she had to scream out.

 Here, when I say I never want to be without you,
 somewhere else I am saying 
I never want to be without you again. And when I touch you 
in each of the places we meet, 

in all of the lives we are, it’s with hands that are dying 
and resurrected.
 When I don’t touch you it’s a mistake in any life, 
in each place and forever.

Bob Hicok