Bob King

Would You Bring Me Back to Life if I Got Bitten by a Dead Blue-eyed Bear?

There are questions we all want to ask,
but we don’t want the answers to, at all:
Am I attractive to you, still, after all these
years? Am I the type of person you still
don’t mind sleeping with? Give it to me
straight. Don’t give it to me. More soberly,
would you try to identify my remains
if you got that call you’d never want to
get & were asked to identify my remains?
Would you cry right away or try to hold it in
until you hung up, agreeing to be there soon?
Do you know that I already know the answer
to that question? Would you drive yourself
to the morgue? Would you call one of our
daughters to drive you there? Even if it
took them a while or a day to get here,
here to their home, to their once-home,
to take you to that cold steel slab with
me on it? Or maybe you’d call your sister
in part so you’d feel less guilty about not
talking to her as much as you should talk
to her, but she’s moved further away & that
might be a hassle for everyone involved,
even if everyone is only really two people
that need to get over themselves, even if
you know that so many have died
not being able to get over themselves
or someone else, & grudges are very much
like souls, because once you physically die,
is there really anything left to hold,
from flesh to ideas, ideas about ideas, dirt
& resentments & misplaced reverences
& rightly placed grievances? Do you
know how much I like the texture of you?
Not just your underwear or skin, but
even the things that might evaporate?
Which is to say, most things. Did you
know I’ve been working on a country song
& it starts, Did you know the kitchen smells
like popcorn & the bedroom smells like weed?
Would you die all at once, or maybe die in
smaller bites so it might take longer to die,
or try your hardest not to die at all? Wait—
might you call my brother? My sister? My
dad, who, I think at this point does see you
as a daughter because sometimes small
distinctions evaporate into no distinctions
& while that persistent mist can lead to
black mold, it just as easily can lead to an
end-of-summer rainstorm in the grocery store’s
parking lot, steam rising from the graying
asphalt, your neck craning around because
it’s just the type of August heat & incoming
relief that might produce a rainbow?