I read this Bob Hicok offering last week in Plougshares, and can’t get it out of my mind. I wasn’t sure I wanted to put it up, but decided to go ahead and do it. I lecture every semester on “hysteria” and the absurd notion of the “wandering uterus”, and will confess that as the just over six-foot son of a woman who did undergo a hysterectomy a decade ago, much of this rings viscerally familiar.
Poem for my Mother’s Hysterectomy
The bell in you out of which I was rung
long ago removed, I cannot go home.
What did they do with your uterus?
I think of it as a hat or a bird,
resting on a head or flying away, over those mountains,
on the other side of which I have never been.
Maybe that’s where the navel of the Earth is,
and these womb birds go there out of memory.
I am that of you: a six-foot-tall memory, graft
that took and learned to drive, pick locks, lick
on other women the door you opened for me.
Why did they call you hysterical
when rage is essential for a pulse, to beat the drum
of being alive?
I know this dream; my face in a jar, saying
I can be anything I want, just not
me.
For you, who had seven children
and wanted more, it must have been
like having your face removed,
the Catholic mirror asking, What has your emptiness
to give?
I miss you as the only water I breathed, as a way of living
at the center of things.
You gave me nine round months, time since
is straight as a knife.
I’ve never asked, What was I in you; a tickle fish, thorn
in your side, a goat
kicking the night?
If I left graffiti in there, a sign or mark,
and was the monster you worried I’d be as sharp-toothed
as the one I am?
“Why did they call you hysterical when rage is essential for a pulse, to beat the drum of being alive?” Wow. Some poem. I like others here, too, that I read of yours.