Places that have become me
       

Poor starling in the B concourse of Logan Airport. You do not
have a laptop. You do not have a cell phone. You do not
have the sky. You have an Au Bon Pain. You have a seafood restaurant
that sells live lobsters to travelers. What a fancy lobster
that would be, who flies first-class to Dallas. While you peck
at the carpet as if it's grass, I want to sneak up on you
so softly you believe I've always been there, that I am a tree
and chaperone you as a tree to Flight 1872 bound for Charlotte,
so you can fly down the B-10 causeway and show the Airbus
how grace is done. Speaking of things out of place, half

an hour away, if you ignore the speed limit, there's a boat
hanging from the ceiling of the chapel at Babson College.
In this case, I don't want to set the boat free; it's an emotion
in the half glass, half wood, fully beautiful room
people go to speak to God in a circle of chairs, a boat
with recessed lighting, a boat with only the waters
of raised voices to sail upon, a boat that would look good
with a starling at its tiller. I said emotion, but it's more
of a sense that heaven has room for our stuff, our boats
and windows, our eyes and the snow I wish had fallen
outside the chapel, in which the immediate sky

is a sky of rescue, a sky of gather two of every creature
that walks or gets lost in Logan Airport and bear them
to a time when trouble is over—this is the Bible
as it is written by this poem. Every large airport
I've been to has had birds in it; only one chapel
I've been to has had a boat in it: this means
our airports are more frequently imaginative
than our worship, and more accidentally cruel. I'm home
now, where starlings and boats are where they belong; I'm the one
out of place if you ask the river, the cows, the coyotes
who come at night, gather their voices into a hoop
and lament, it seems to me, nothing.

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Copyright © 2012 Bob Hicok All rights reserved
from Iron Horse Literary Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission