Bob Hicok For the chance The mechanics of prayer are not straight forward anymore. There are the pulleys, all five of them. Counterweights and the bubble level. The survey map, the contour map, the map of secret passages. There's the ingestion of a library. The touching of the forehead against a satellite         as it sleeps in the cradle of a rocket. The wandering years, the settled years, the years of no. Ablutions in shit. Kneeling in broken glass. The impossibility of God. I pray for your face to be a calming influence on war. That hello shows up at your door when you're trying to recall           if it works best, cutting along or across the veins. For small boxes of powders and estuaries to arrive by mail. That you dream a suit of left hands appears in your closet           for the ball. For the chance to lift a building with the word maybe. For the chance to meet yourself as you would have been           if you hadn't tried. I pray that a star lives in your orgasm. I pray your shadow takes walks on its own, that it turns itself in           to the dry cleaner. I pray by closing my eyes and thinking of you           closing your eyes and thinking of me. By looking at the porch and wondering if it remembers           being a tree. Imagine that, having once gripped the earth with feet           that are also mouths, also hands, also obstinacy           before the storm. Imagine not falling down for hundreds of years. All that listening. All those leaves speaking for wind and the absence of wind. Marginalia: the river in her knees --- Lithe The girl held her hand in the water, behind her mother's red skirt, to feel its wake. In the margin of page thirty two, in the book with the jade boards, she wrote, using her wet hand, I have never kissed a tree. Her legs by then curled underneath, a secret. Certain things had to be washed in the river. Certain dishes were set out in the rain. On her side, eyes closed, the girl moved her palm over the grass, a hundred lips against her skin. When she opened her eyes, her mother had swam away. Beside her, the red skirt drying into the shape of her future hips, a hole in the water where her mother had stood, looking at the path which goes up the mountain like a question mark. --- Self sufficient She sharpened every pencil in the pack. An electric sharpener was cheating. She had to feel her hand turning against the will of the tree. That's what we think with when we write, she wrote on page sixty four, trees. Her mother gone three weeks. She ate nothing but macaroni and cheese. She stayed up late in the brown chair, leather worn down by what had been her father, chair in which the scraping of her father against the world still lived. Pencils everywhere. In the freezer. On the window sills. Shavings in the garden, turned by her hand inside the dirt. A drawing in her head of a pencil tree. The book sounded more like wind read backwards. --- Origins She was four. And snuck into. Her parents' room. As it turned out. Just hours. After her father. Had left . To touch. Her mother's gills. They were never. A secret. But never. Explained. They were just. Pink. And under. Her breasts. Which the girl also. Touched. Her hands. Remembering more. Than words could. When her mother. Spoke. The girl was not. Surprised. She knew. Her mother knew. Everything. That she was not. Sneaking into. The room. But living up to. An agreement. They had. Without speaking. That one body. Is not one body. But every. What does. It feel like. Inside water. The girl asked. Not knowing. The father had left. I think. Nothing like this. Her mother said. Dropping her arm. Across the space. Beside her. Filled. With his leaving. And the girl. Put her nose. Against the pink louvers. In her mother. To smell. Where everything. Came from. --- Speak to the words The book seemed to be about a fox. And yet the word fox never appeared in the book. The girl held the book to the bathroom mirror. Maybe the mirror saw the fox and would tell the girl. The mirror noticed the immaculate reeds and told the girl. She went to school with the book down her pants, to sleep with the book beneath her pillow, she touched herself with the spine of the book in the spot that made the feeling of rain fall down her legs. By then, she'd written more words in the book than the book had gathered into the feeling of a fox without the sound for fox. Under the pillow, her words would speak to the words about a fox minus the sound for fox. Other sounds were born from this conversation, words she'd not touched with trees into life and words that did not have the feeling of fox inside them. This made her feel like she wasn't needed by the book. On page ninety nine, the last page of the book, the page she was never going to read, the page that had different sounds on it every time she opened the book, she wrote, do you need me? And buried the book. And put stones over what the book might answer. But somehow, when she turned the faucet to wash her face that night, in the water, the sound of yes. --- Exodus And there she was. Taking the river off her shoulders. Asking if her daughter needed something to eat. Asking, did you bury the book? Answering how she knew that by telling the story of her own book, of the hole she dug, of the question she wrote on the last page, that she never wants answered, of running from any garden that seems about to speak. Lift your shirt, the mother said. There they were. Gills. Moving like. Speaking. Tingling like. The rain spot. You should go now, the mother said. And the girl felt the river in her knees, and the girl felt the river lifting her hair, and the girl felt the moon missing water, pulling her body with this missing. You should go now, the mother said. And they walked to the river. And the girl let go her mother's hand into breath. about Bob Hicok