Milinda’s Questions

Here’s another old post that someone’s come looking for recently: a poem by Harvey Hix. As I said when I originally posted it,

Googling his name will produce some biographical data and some prose writings, but this will be the first online poem, so far as I can tell. It’s from his first collection, Perfect Hell, published in 1996 by Gibbs Smith, Publisher, of Salt Lake City, and is reproduced here without any permission whatsoever, which will have to CMA on the copyright stuff.

Moreover, somehow storing it in my archives screwed up the line and stanza spacing, so I had to reconstruct it. Hope I’ve got it right.

Definite Descriptions

The choice divorced from decision.

The year with too few and too many days.

The juxtaposition
The result of which is always
The perfect elision.

The thing that now neither of them says.

The passion to consummate their destruction.

The color found only in his eyes.

The Earth Mother’s granddaughter,
Rose Rose Rose,
The water she bathes with, where she nests,
What she shows,
The men she ingests.

The one man still living who knows
The difference in size between her breasts.

harvey hix