Search Results for: Bob Hicok
Bob Hicok
Poet physics
Eventually
I will never see you
again
Can you hear the ripping
of me in emotion
tending to stay
in emotion
apart?
It's not just opera
that tells me this is so
or midnights of drinking
the moon under the table,
even galaxies
in an expanding universe
are lonelier
all the time
Eventually
the night will lose
its stars and go dark
and a person
is a tumbleweed
at heart
Everything
about the beginning
and ending
of everything
says why bother
holding hands
but we do
Willful
wounded
fucks
that we are
Obscure sorrows
It's a mistake to be a poet and try to write
the biography of music or everything
for that matter about the wind
and snow stopping midair
to adjust its hair
is ineffable, yet I keep effing trying
to become what I love, I think
is what's going on here
and why it's tragic
I'm not falling snow
looking like Satie sounds
in Anne Queffélec's hands
from Paris, who is eternal
a little bit this morning
before dawn and god
are awake, douloureux
avec conviction and grave.
Later I'll look up at the stars
and sooner what gnossienne means
while it snows, probably
almost the same as what it means
while it rains. For now I thank
Rob Goad in Farnborough, Hampshire
for filling out "Customs Declaration CN22"
in BLOCK CAPITALS as demanded by the form
and sending me Satie again
after twenty years of my ears
wore out my previous CD.
These fingers teaching this song
to this piano in East Woodhay, Newbury
in March 1988 fall now
like the shadow of a wing
across my heart: I am not
the favorite child of a favorite parent
who held my hand as I fell
over a leaf and never quite
got over being alive
to this day, silly
how much comes down to being
and believing in being
wanted, I would say everything
there is to say
if I had the time
and melancholy tongue
of a certain composer, nostalgia
for what never happened
is art, isn't it
too late to be the sky?
A place for everything
I took a cricket outside. It was either that
or grow grass inside and then trees for the grass
to look up to. It was still a cricket outside,
and a better cricket, just as an elephant
would be a better elephant stolen from a circus
and put in a taxi for a flight back to Africa.
But what about slivers? If I get a sliver in my hand,
isn't that the only place it can be a sliver,
or in your hand, your arch-enemy's? For once removed,
doesn't a sliver die and become just a tiny
piece of wood? And what about a broken heart?
If you love again, where does it go?
It's tougher to know where I belong. I once
stole a violin and tried to join the crickets
as part of the soundtrack of the dark
but they ignored my legato and refused to sing
until I left the band. I'm not exactly at home
at home or in a straight jacket or crooked rocket,
in a canoe on a rock or a canoe in a tree
or on a branch in the tree of life, as I'm always
on top of or falling off a wave or looking for a wave
to carry me to a hill or island, the imagined
better place where I'm a better man than my father
or his father at the exotic skills called "listening"
and "giving a shit about something other than myself."
I'm trying to learn from the wind, which is at home
in its homelessness and has kind hands
most of the time, when it's not a tornado or derecho,
soft and intermittent in their insistence
that it's better to be gentle than a hammer,
better to dry people's clothes
than ask them to solve your problems, better
to carry pollen to flowers and trees
than a switchblade in your pocket and a fist
in your eye when you look at the world
defensively, as an occasion for boxing
and not an excuse to put your cheek
to a cheek and dance. By you I mean you
and me, I mean us, I mean every self's
a sliver stuck in a body
with nowhere else to go. Hence the necessity
of this word in all its forms and disguises,
its capes and cloaks and whispers and screams:
ouch. And this phrase: all hope is lost.
And this confection: every sunrise
deserves a chance to get off the ground.
Call and response
For a year I've been emailing with a kid from Egypt.
His brother was beaten to death for asking for democracy.
He sends me sad poems that I show Eve and the sky
in Virginia and I send him my lineated wishes
to be as useful as moonlight on a leaf on a lake.
I think life's the same everywhere
in how often it deceives us
that life's the same everywhere
when not even death's the same anywhere.
The brother was given back to the family
"with roses for eyes my mother tried to kiss into bloom."
It's strange the things we'll tell strangers
in poems but won't tell loved ones
because their hearts are far away
like the bottom of the ocean.
When I asked if he shows his mother his poems,
he said that he draws for her instead,
usually a lion in the arms of his brother, sketches
he leaves around the house and sets adrift on the Nile.
I like emailing someone who touches such a famous river.
I tell my lesser river what it might become
and wonder how much of the water that flows past my dreams
once flowed through Egypt or the body of a slave who worked
on Khafre. Verse. Inverse. Adverse. Multiverse. Universe:
everything's a turning, of letters into words, screams
into silences, of a man swinging a club against a spine
into a woman straightening her son's hair a last time
into a poem about her shadow climbing up her body
and pouring itself into her mouth.
I've always wanted to be something I'm not, a dog
or poet or hope, and in response to the call
of his shadow poem, a metal bucket
that clangs against stones with high notes
going into a well and a deeper music coming out,
after I've swallowed as much life as I can give
to his mother and others upon receipt of their thirst.
The island
There's a bit of woods between two malls here.
Not much more than a big living room,
kitchen, and den, square foot wise.
Fifteen or twenty trees. A scrap.
A memory.
When I go from one mall to the other,
I'm reminded that this land
used to be covered in trees,
that toads and wasps and cardinals and snails
and moss and a stream and coyotes
lived here, and some of those
still do, just fewer, and sadder,
with no green horizon
to contend with. Mostly
the spot's home to trash
and cats. Someone feeds them,
leaves cans of food, or someones.
The copse should be beautiful
but isn't, shouldn't be there
but is, is ironic
but I'm not sure how. It's as if
among the stun guns
and blood sluices
in a slaughter house,
one of Chagall's angels
sits unfinished and incapable
of flight on an easel,
creating the impression
that he'll be back any minute
to go on with the dream.
I would like to go on with the dream.
Where is sleep when you need it?
Or sense? Black cats, all of them
black cats for some reason,
as if there's not enough night in the world.
Work
I rake leaves as fast as I can. Not into piles
but in waves from the sycamore to the woods,
from the oak, from the maple to the woods.
Rake facing forward and backward, rake away from
and into my body, rake standing beside
and within the waves, rake facing the woods
and facing the mountain, as if rowing a canoe
or pulling moonlight into my chest.
I kick and push as I rake, rake with the rake
and rake with my legs, add the tool
of my body to the tool in my hands. Once I start
I don't stop. Like the Pacific. Like starlight.
Like the universe sprinting toward and away
from itself. My arms burn, my throat. I sweat.
I become the sum of the actions I am taking,
the churn of the different accents of leaves
that don't all sound the same, as no two clouds
look upon us with equal shade. I do this
to protect the grass over winter. To live as fire
among the dead. Because I have a nature
within nature that has no nature
other than itself. And when I'm done.
When I'm buried and someone rakes leaves
over my head and no one's left to think of me
pouring a glass of water and holding it up
to the light, I'll have tried to ask
the right questions in the right way.
Some with my mouth and others
by throwing my body down a hill
and rolling in whatever manner
motion has in store for me, to end up here,
a man and not wisteria, a poet and not
a ukulele, a brevity
of desperate and dangerous sentience
and not the longer brevity
of a thoughtlessly nurturing sun.
Bird
For two weeks, a cardinal has pecked
at the rival of its own reflection
in my favorite of all the windows
that help me love mountains.
I'd like to save it but don't speak
stupid bird, only stupid man,
and the worms I've offered it
that have drunk from the river
are not wine, and life does not have enough
yellow leaves, and I only have two arms,
am shamed in my accoutrements
by spiders and octopi, do not speak longing
or the Big Bang or ocean, just English,
which has twenty seven words for doodad
but no word for a bird whose enemy
is itself. This is not the first
obsessive-compulsive cardinal
to do this, and I'm not the last
possessive-impulsive poet
in the next fifteen minutes
who'll hypothesize that the self
is the interloper no one can escape.
At least this tick-tick-ticking is something
of a metronome, a heart
that has the work ethic of starlight
and the personality of a last chance.
But a metronome deserves a piano
and I don't have one, so now
the grocery list is bread, eggs,
something to live for, strawberry jam,
cherry jam, tornado jam, baby grand,
and a hawk to cure the cardinal of what ails it
and make the sky jealous of wings.
I call this one “poem”
Do you think kites worry about falling down?
Or that mirrors are afraid to look themselves
in the eye? Many trees appear angsty, all jointy
and pointy, but I bet they're actually very calm.
I want my guitar to be loved by someone
who'll lean over it and make its body
part of their body twenty nine hours a day
and buy it roses and take it to Istanbul
or the trestle and sit there playing songs
for all the trains that don't come this way anymore.
And I want to be happy like that, and for you to be happy
wearing whatever shoes or expression you adore.
Do you remember the old advice to climb every fountain?
I get stuck like silence in the pocket of a dead man
buried in his favorite socks and forget to live
as Paul Klee painted. When I look at his Twittering Machine,
I want a life of greater simplicity on a little hill
with sheep not far from water in one of its forms, a lake
or stream or crying. Asked as a kid what I wanted to be
when I grew up, I always said, "An arrangement of a vase,
a sextant, and a plastic t-rex on a window sill
as the sun looks at your coffee and you wait for an ant
to get to the top of the t-rex and look around,
when you have no pestering or festering thoughts,
just a sense that everything is as it should be."
And also, of course, like every other kid, lightning.
Truth is the art of lying
In a paint-pealing town
Richard Hugo would love,
with fog-colored houses and people
who dream with a limp, I drew a likeness
of the ocean for the ocean in sand
with a stick. That night,
the ocean suggested I try again,
so I tried again as I try
with everything—eating lunch,
working to fail better
at my goodbyes, wondering
which version of heaven
stars believe in, the forever one
or the none of this is real one
(I suppose it depends on the star)—
and drew a lighthouse the next day
with the same stick instead.
It amazes me how versatile
a stick can be,
all the contradictory thoughts
it can hold in its head,
and that the ocean
washed away everything else
but left the lighthouse alone
and shining in my mind. Time
has so much time
to perfect its alibis,
to prove it was elsewhere
when everything went wrong,
as everything that is anything
will. All those Hugo towns
weren't towns but him,
and in my poem towns,
everyone you meet
has drowned at sea
but shows up for work
anyway. Just look at me.
A transcript
She holds her phone to the cancer.
I tell her I hear hornets but only a few.
She dreamt her breasts were mushy apples
she threw into a pie. I hold the phone
to my left foot I can no longer move.
She tells me she hears a stampede of horses.
I tell her I saw a roan early one morning
running down the Champs-Élysées,
even though it was a deer. She says
Paris sounds great right now,
and tries to walk me down a street I don't know
to a sculpture of a little girl holding the moon
on a string. I'm not sure if this is real
or what she's always wanted art
to believe of itself, but if this is part
of her saying goodbye to her breasts,
I support the moon on a string. They ask you
what size new breasts you want, she says,
leaving lots of open air after the statement
for me or a stray owl to fill. I wait,
listen to her breath and winter
grinding its teeth outside. Then she says
boobs and I say boobs back, a funny word
instead of crying. The whole time we're talking,
I think of licking a scalpel, my mouth
full of blood that turns into roses
that want to be words. Where are you,
it finally occurs to me to ask. The only place
anyone ever is, she says: here.
There is no such thing as a still painting or life
I hate ekphrastic poetry.
When I read it, I am a pope in blue
screaming between two sides of beef
hanging behind me from the ceiling, they are wings
of slaughter, I am the angel of power
and the rot it induces
yet I'll never fly, and no one
will ever hear my scream or make burgers
of the cow, and though Lake Michigan
is less than a mile away, I am dry
and untouched in my life by sunlight.
Let's go to Chicago instead of writing
or reading this poem. We can look at the Bacon
and eat bacon and go see da fish
in da Shedd and walk and walk and walk
beside and between all the old buildings
and I'll tell you I've never hunted
unless you include catching frogs
or looking for myself in my mother's eyes.
I suppose fireflies count
slowly, blink by blink,
and I caught a pike when I was ten
and wearing the one shirt I felt
safe in, it was red and had a hole in it
that grew over the summer into my desire
to run away and that I'm always hunting
the moment a river stops
mumbling and clearly says everything
is parable or allegory except drowning
in moonlight or tears.
And you can tell me that when you look at
Figure With Meat, you see a pile of blue tulips
bleeding on a kitchen counter
before they're put in a vase, or a woman bleeding
to death while her son is born, or honesty
severing the artery of a friendship, or a cow
that could use one or a million band-aids,
or a man whose anguish reminds you of how you felt
five minutes or months or years ago
and that you can no more find or imagine
what you want than the air can stop slouching
or god figure out where god came from,
and a dead cow or pheasant or anything
won't answer that question, and a man
with cow wings is at least intent on ascent.
The point is I really want to go to Chicago
with you and say shit that a poem
might like to have in its mouth
because I love ecstatic poetry
and people and lakes and skies, and adore
Bacon and bacon because none of us
seem comfortable with death, and I too
don't know what I want or how to get
to a shore from which that unknowing
is at least a ship I might board
and look back from at everything
I'm leaving behind and bow once
in its direction before I turn
into the wind.
A sound decision
Birds would have scattered at the shot, starlings blasted
out of the startled woods and gyred as a cloud
before settling into other trees.
Deer would have scattered as well, or looked up
from their eating toward the sound, same as a man
at his table in the near dark or with the first light
of the evening switched on, the sound surprisingly soft, like a book
that tried to fly away but fell from the shelf instead,
in a room at the far end of the house behind a closed door,
a book he's always meant to read but who has the time.
A week before, she tried to recall when she last felt publicly sexy,
noticed for symmetry, grace of movement.
I think it was the confirmation of her existence that she missed,
the proof that we crave from god that we're not a dream
but will accept from people.
She left no suicide note, or short story, or novel, though filmed herself
skating on a pond, long glides and axels in resistance
to chemo, an insistence through precision that her body was hers.
Women don't generally prefer the calibered withdrawal, or so they say
who say such things.
Visiting the tree that held her last, I sat and leaned
where she leaned and thought for the first time
of the roar of the sun and that all our screams
would be less than a whisper against the mouth of a star.
It was snowing enough to cover my tracks, so by the time I left,
it appeared I had always been there. I could hear the snow fall,
hear it hush my ears and the air and my blood
and the dead leaves of the oak that won't drop until spring,
when new leaves will cast old shade.
A book, a mirror
We were away for the first time since COVID,
Sullivan's Island with its long flat beach,
and over two days I saw several hundred pelicans,
four dolphins, and one person reading a book.
Everyone else on the beach who was reading
was looking at their phone or tablet.
Even while the ocean was raging,
writing its autobiography, screaming for attention,
many kept their heads down and swiped or typed.
We walked as far as we could, until the beach
ran out of people and then itself, Sumter
to our left, just a stone's throw
were I a giant. That's when I saw the dolphins.
When I looked up the beach, no one was noticing them
arcing up and down as if sewing the ocean together
where it had ripped. They were ours, and for a moment
I forgot that I've never used social media
and don't even own a smart phone, and posted
to my followers, You're missing dolphins,
and endorphins, and the world. I did not.
Nor did I cry. I did want to travel back in time
and kill Steve Jobs, and would have had Steve Jobs
invented time travel before he died.
I also remembered that I want to connect with people
but have never been good at it, and that my generation
has provided no great example of intimacy
to compete with the near sexual envelopment
of the internet's self-selectable reality.
At the heart of technology is an apology owed.
For the car, the phone, the jet, the hell
of html, for solitude in all its hidden forms.
The ease with which we can escape each other
is a measure of our distance from ourselves.
What kind of life have we built that taking a picture
of a sunset beats staring at the sun
while you safely can? We don't flock to sunsets
because they're pretty but to look a star,
our maker, in the eye. Four dolphins.
I followed their breaths with my breath and gaze
as long as I could, to this day.
And we read to be alone with everyone
who has ever had a thought and written it down,
ever not wanted to die and put a note in a bottle
begging for salvation, ever thought a bird
and a word shared a love of song
with Double Dutch and our mothers
calling us home, with the sky
and wanting to fly. All roads and suns
lead to Icarus, to myth and missing
so much what we've never known
that we cover white pages with the shadows
of our absences and pray they fill strangers up.
And when we're not reading them, books
are alone too, are undreamed dreams
until they're held and opened, same as we are.
Yum
Had I known she was making her cornbread
with the eighth-inch layer of something soft
and sweet on top, I'd have worn my good shirt,
pulled up a chair for the sun, set a violin
on the chair, and thought of my hands
as having talent, the kind of skill
to make a violin or make a violin
whisper her name. But in my common shirt,
my shirt good enough for any Sunday
or cloudy day or busted guitar
by the side of the road, I ate the cornbread anyway,
more than I should have, like enough
to feed all of the ants at an ant wedding.
I'm going to get fat, and old,
and even less responsive to telemarketers,
I'm going to forget where I parked
my love of moonlight falling down a mountain,
but I'll never forget my scars, the one
on my left foot and the one
on my right hand and the one on my left forearm,
not until I'm dead awhile and no one knows
how much cornbread I ate today
or that I put my mouth over her heart
and thanked it for pumping its bouquet
of liquid roses around and around. To be honest,
I've never known where to direct respect
or admiration, and joy, for that matter,
could be a tuba tied to my ankle
as the ship goes down and I'd still grin
over the god-damned oom-pahs, that they existed,
that I got to hear them, that I got to wonder
if sound has a body and a name
just like me, or not just like me
but a lot like me, or nothing like me
except the brevity, and I don't own
a good shirt, per se, or bad shirts,
for that matter, just shirts, most of them blue
if they're not storm-colored or green,
different versions of different forests
and skies that I wear to blend in
with the other trees and thunder
trying to find a place to stand
or make a sound that means something
to a bird or lightning or heaven.
No actual prostate was wounded
in the writing of this poem
I'm abra, she's cadabra. I'm a prostate exam,
she's the thumbs up after. A thumbs up during
wouldn't get to the root of the question.
I'm falling down the stairs drunk,
she's falling down the stairs often,
we're both closed-head injuries
with a soupcon of traction. I'm a car fire
on the highway, she's s'mores
wherever they're needed. I'm a piano
under water under ice, she's sheet music
lowered on a fishing line. Dear Eric Satie,
How many pushups can the sun do? I'm in love
with her wrinkles, which there are more of
by the hour, each wrinkle has a baby wrinkle
and so on, it's as if she's a fan or flower
unfolding, a rose with questions
about wrinkle creams. I'm not sure
what to have for breakfast, she's not sure
how to talk to her mother, we're not sure
where we'll live when we're dead. The ground,
yes, but that's a big neighborhood,
could we be a little more specific,
asks the shovel. If I dug up
all our dead animals, know what I'd have?
Bones. It wasn't a trick question,
though it has been a trick life.
She's the pause at a concert
when everyone's happy with the last song
and waiting to be happy with the next song,
the band tuning their guitars and hair
and the light of stars
tuning their long distance running,
and I'm the smell of pot in your shirt
twenty years later making you cry
because you weren't there
but your shirt was. And there's so much to do
but why is there no such thing
as a "to don't" list?
To don't take her for granted, I live with her.
To don't take her for granite,
I keep the word igneous and her face
close to my heart and my heart
close to my chest and my chest
bathed in moonlight at all times.
Bob Hicok’s ninth collection, Hold, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2018. A two-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and recipient of the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress, he’s also been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and eight Pushcart Prizes, and his poems have been selected for inclusion in nine volumes of The Best American Poetry. He teaches at Virginia Tech.
Bob Hicok
Advanced anatomy
My heart is a kite. I thought that all yesterday
and finally looked: my heart is a muscle
and kite is prison slang for a note. As many words
as Eskimos have for snow, prisoners have for knife.
My heart is a knife. I thought that ten seconds ago
and as long as I add "sometimes" I think that's right.
Machete or bolo, steak or butter, depending on the way
the wind blows. I flew a kite as a kid as high
as a jet: I say that but don't believe I ever did
exist as a kid. I think I was born at thirty eight
and went straight into middle-management and drinking
and crying. My heart is a hearse or worse:
a curse. People die all the time never having kissed
my lips or flown a kite. Poor lips, poor sky:
who do you look up to and how many kites
can you hold at one time? Poor heart, in your room
all alone, sent to bed without supper or given the chance
any ordinary crow gets to fly. As if
there's such a thing as an ordinary crow. I know:
they're all great and besides, my heart is a purse
where blood comes and goes and change
is always found. Just yesterday I was so happy
that I painted a dragon on my chest, tied a string
to one ankle, a tail to the other
and took a day off from gravity to hang out
with wind. Look at me now, a stone
writing a stone's poem: life is heavy and hard.
My heart is no bard but a liar. Ask it to come in.
It'll either say No one's home or Where have you been
or both. That's what my heart murmur is, the mixed
and garbled truth: if it's possible to feel
eight things at one time, why not nine?
My heart is a radio asking me to dance to static
and I do. The key is elbows and knees,
to keep them sharp and flailing, to accept
that I'm a scarecrow on acid and there's no place
to hide from lightning in an open field. My heart
is the best friend metaphor ever had, is a book,
a ball, a brick, a wall, a fall from a great height
into a thimble of lava, a leaf, a forest, a torrent
of hail or water or screaming, is any and every
but mostly this one thing: the god
whose indifference I'm stuck with.
From one resurrection to another
Thank you for walking your eyes beside mine
along both sides of one ocean and one side
of another; for lifting clouds off my chest;
for buying irises for roses;
for never punching anyone in the face
or setting anyone on fire
or running anyone over with a tank
or drowning a baby in a river
or screaming at a waiter or ants
or signing an arrest warrant
or writing or thinking acceptable losses
in any context or city
imagined or known, present or future,
with ice cream nearby
or far far away; thank you
for forgiving me for being intolerant
of your lactose intolerance—
with frozen yogurt nearby
or far far away; with the universe expanding
and galaxies swimming away from us
and our bodies throwing in the towel
and shouting turning into the new folk music
and April the new December;
thank you for your face,
which is my favorite part of your soul,
which is my favorite part of the ether,
which is my favorite part of knowing
that everything we touch and love
is secretly sunlight, deeply a star
that died and got lost on the way home.
Ode to now
We are squawking, walking, going mad,
going under, undergoing surgery, perjury,
losting and finding, minding our mannerisms
but not the store. We are stalking, hawking,
balking at engaging the mess we have made,
wounds to civility and trees, holes in sky
and soul, too busy, queasy, sensibly in love
with easy ways out or in or through,
depending on the day or door. We: me and you:
we two and we thousand million: we one
and all: how corral tens or billions or even
a few? And to or for what: love?
Of each other, kind, green? How sappy.
I'd be happy for quiet. This place shakes,
vibrates, is coming apart at the seams
as it seems we're afraid to do the most basic thing
we were born to: talk. As in sit and, as in can we,
as in I'd love to have a coffee or gin
or two thousand with you, here and now
or there and then, on Earth as it is in Heaven,
our daily gift of gab and bread, the reachings
of head to head. A word I adore
is adore, I guess breath most of all,
the grab and hold and lift and luck of it,
the chance we won't waste our chance
to be more like rain, to flow and shine,
touch and give as we up and go.
The life of the rough night
I found her in the morning cutting hair from her head
to burn or banish on the river,
a practice run at mourning. Why wait?
She'd risen from bed
to think about the dead getting closer to her parents
by the day, to not sleep
a little differently on the couch from how she'd turned
like a lathe on her side
of dreaming. She'd taken a crowbar to the dark, her eyes red
from trying to break inside
what has no end or center or beginning, while all night
crickets taunted,
“Nothing Changes.” If you want to be reborn, die;
if you want to love,
hurry up: what's a year, a decade, a life to water: a person's
a sheaf of rain
in a thirsty world. Rain rain don't go away: there is
no other day.
Bob Hicok is the author of nine poetry collections, including Sex & Love & and Hold (Copper Canyon Press, 2018). Hicok received the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress, as well as eight Pushcart Prizes. He is a professor of creative writing at Virginia Tech.
Bob Hicok
Naked
My wife is sick. I've dug a moat around our house.
Wolves are coming and wolves can jump. Viruses are coming
on wingéd feet. My eyes are full of slivers. My brain
is a fist of mud. I watch her sleeping and hang
on the hook of every wheeze. What if the boomerang
of her breath doesn't come back? What if angels
haven't done enough pushups? Without her
I'm my nipples—useless. Are there fairy tales
of men nursing stars? Is it too late for me
to be God? Lord, I'll live as a tree
if you make each second
a Russian nesting doll,
if each time she looks at me
opens into smaller versions
of the never ending bending of light
around her face. Everything
is all I ask. Take my hair, testicles,
seventy seven percent of the bones
that puzzle me upright, take me
first: I don't want to sit at a table
and explain to our spoons that she is gone.
They'll gouge my eyes out and I'll thank them
and break their backs. Ruin hides here
no matter what. The question is
lava or flame throwers. I say both.
There are living silences and dead silences
and I'll cut my ears off and burn them
and bury the ashes along with my hands
if I'm made to listen to the absence
of her warmth. My weakness is my oath.
There's nothing to me except the luck of her
lifting the five blankets on her body
again and again. To her very last atom, I beg heave.
Proof of life
Eleven people like my wife have been killed
in Pittsburgh and three hundred people
like my wife have gathered in a temple
in Roanoke to pass the vibrations
of the old words through their bodies.
So many Jews
they hurt the fire code's feelings. So many Jews
they were a sea wearing shoes. So many Jews
the warmth of pressing shoulders and thighs
loosened the wires around their mouths
and opened the doors of their faces.
Singing off key or on, crying silently
or like pots and pans
thrown down the stairs,
bringing their inadequacies
to a room full of befuddlements,
they turned fear
into resting their hearts
against gun barrels.
The work of being a good person
is easier around others who also
aren't sure how to be a good person
or even if it's good to be a person.
So many Jews
breathing like everyone else
and breathing differently
from everyone else, breathing thoughtlessly
as a river and breathing intentionally
as a nation and breathing in the sweat lodge
of the unconscious and breathing as proof
that not giving up minus eleven
equals not giving up
minus a number I'm thinking of
from the past, from the world's
muscular imagination
for erasure
Love love me do
My wife's such a good person
she'd be an excellent dolphin
or whale. She eats kale, wears
Doc Martins, is smart enough
not to come out of the rain,
how else explain how green
her thumb and mind and smile
are, not that I need to
do more than exceed
to my desire to surround her
with the sound of me saying,
"Is that an apple pie
in my pocket or am I lucky
I flunked suicide
at nineteen and zombied
my way to meeting you
eleven years later?"
That's a long sentence,
thirty years to life
if I hadn't happened
upon what is still, all sags
aside, the face
with the most upside
whenever I happen
to see her as if
I never have before, you know
how that is: you look up
from washing yellow eggs
off a red plate and being
sure your life's over
when there's your lover
or husband or wife
watching you with eyes
that could melt a cat, not
that you'd want to do that,
and you're what:
simultaneously torn
into confetti and reborn.
How's that for sticking
a thumb in the eye
of physics?
Song of climate change: on the rocks
I hate ice in whiskey, on my car, my nipples.
Ice is water that's too good to look me in the eyes.
Ice leads to hockey and hockey leads to Canadians
with gap-toothed smiles. What do we say of the dead:
cold as ice. But ice doesn't deserve to be killed.
First of all, it's fairly reclusive, mostly hangs out
at the poles. Without ice there'd be no polar bears,
arctic terns, penguins. Watching penguins swim
and not get eaten by orcas makes me happy.
Watching orcas eat penguins makes me believe the world
is a self-regulating system and I should mind my own business.
Was a self-regulating system and we did not mind
our own business. What is our business? What do we add
to the endeavor? Don't say cathedrals, Beethoven,
two-for-one sales on diapers and Colt 45s. Do say carbon dioxide,
heat, ignorance of our affect on whales, monarchs, winter.
What if the world is a grape and we are a bruise?
What if we're being given what we want most of all,
we who are the memory singers, nostalgia machines:
what if elegy is our calling and we need death
to feed our desire to lament how good things were
before cars, Jiffy Pop, fake tits, Miracle-Gro,
us? We tell one story: Eden. Once upon a time
things were better. Once upon a time
our minds were simple and we were happy. Once upon a time
human nature wasn't what it really is and that's all it took
to live at ease in the garden: to not be us. If your nature's
your danger, your gist a fist, your essence a pestilence,
what do you do to not be you? Kill yourself or evolve. Sorry:
I meant to write an ode, a ditty about something wild
and pretty. That's how it is with us—we almost always
mean well: to give strangers a ride, eat more vegetables,
vacuum the house, not break the world. To be kind
and that fabled, mythic thing—wise.
The waltz
Spiritual disquiet keeps me awake.
I have lived a pointless life. I think this
to my closed eyes and the ceiling
of the dark. On the couch and in bed.
With the TV on and off. With the TV on,
my spiritual disquiet goes to Mars
or arrests a man for raping an eleven year old.
My emptiness feels moral and productive.
The man goes to prison and people return
from a cold and distant place.
We don't think of men having periods
but there are cycles in me, swoons and dips
I have studied long enough
to throw up my hands. Tonight
I will know I am nothing and tomorrow
have a single egg and piece of toast
for breakfast, there will be birds
where birds belong and I will be
on the upswing toward happiness
as it has come to me, rarely unaccompanied
by the memory of wanting to die.
A chapter in the story of a mind
He read a long article about people
still wondering if consciousness is real
about an hour after thinking of someone
pulling fish out of the air and eating them,
giving him new ideas of what it means to be air,
a fish, a man.
Though he had never had the fish thought before,
he has often wondered what kind of object a thought is,
given that he doesn't exactly see or hear
or feel his thoughts so much as encounter them
in a space roughly coexistent with what he calls
his life.
The thought that thoughts are quantum
in nature, appearing out of nowhere and going back
to the ghost rooms and tunnels they come from
when he turns his head at or into a window,
just appeared out of nowhere and could an angel
for all he knows, could be god reaching out
not to be alone.
The thing is, as his thoughts have come and gone,
none have left an exact record of their being,
and will disappear with him, making his single death
multiple and rippled and pinning sadness
deep within his brain.
Is melancholy the only word I know
that turns holy at the end, he asks with no intention
of looking for others, happy to leave that a list
of one.
Teach a man to make a meal of loss
and he will live forever, he thinks, pretty sure
it is a round thought, a good thought, a thought the sun
would touch and warm and cast no shadow beneath
if it could.
A lament, pep talk, and challenge walk into a bar
I put a piano in my office. Tuba. Piccolo. Drum kit.
Banjo. Zither. Carnegie Hall. The Four Tops and Seasons.
Greek chorus. Music of the spheres and triangles
and dodecahedrons. The Kinks. The Mozarts
and Fats Wallers and Puentes. The Butthole Surfers.
My office is bigger and more flexible than my heart
and this is a weird way to critique my affections
but so be it: the intervention is underway. Do you feel
small? I feel tiny lately. Like a good person
would remove the doors of his house and give the poor
a controlling interest in JP Morgan and storm congress
with onesies and pillows and hold that flotilla of egos
hostage in a sleepover until the Decency Act is passed
unanimously and do unto others goes from words
dropped in the suggestion box to law. Why aspire
to the part of a thimble when galaxies
are shinier role models? I should be putting meals
on wheels or moving Miami to a higher elevation
or helping strangers with their calculus homework.
I speak shovel, yammer hammer, have drills and bits,
wrenches and jigs, elbows and frontal lobes, and have noticed
when I throw up my hands in frustration
they come back, they take their responsibilities
to hold and carry seriously and so should I
be a ladle or hammock, spoon or cradle, a yodel
or other reaching across the distance
to the factions and splinter groups of the tribe
or clan of woman and man. It's no accident I began
this meandering with music: no two species could come
from more distant planets than a Steinway and sax,
yet listen to how well they get along
when they put their mouths where our fears are,
when they lend us our better tuned selves. My ears
were raised by Ray Charles and Johnny Cash, so I hum
and flow and stumble, rasp and trance and moan
between two sets of certainties, that we are angelic
junkies, fallen and blind, and that we can rise
and see. The deepest soundtrack of my being
is a black man and The Man in Black breathing into me
the one and only commandment: don't just have
but be a soul
Bones
Lunar eclipse. The moon's an orange
and it's really cold: my wife
has cut me open, pulled out my stuff
and climbed inside to save herself.
I think I'm not kidding.
I think I crave being so terrified of the Earth
coming between the moon and the sun
that I turn into a cave painter
in Kroger: do you like my elk,
my caribou; a bison is a symbol
of my 4Runner's lack of magnificence.
Give me something elemental, not carbon
or iridium but my brain in my hand
and chucking it at the sky. An orange.
A withered orange. I think I'm talking
about my spirit.
I'm sure I'm begging fire
to be the only mirror
I can see myself clearly in.
Bob Hicok‘s most recent book is Sex & Love & (Copper Canyon, 2016). Elegy Owed (Copper Canyon, 2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Bob Hicok
Meditation on a bris of sorts
Four Manhattans—
worth of ice, minus rats, restaurants, and Central Parks,
broke off from Antarctica the other day.
The stock market didn't notice.
Congress argued about sweat socks
or people marrying people
with the same junk
when only opposite junk
should be "I doed,"
was the thinking of the senator
from 1947. My question
all through college was: can humans
intentionally evolve?
Can seventeen hundred people
gather in a convention hall and talk
about shoelaces or war until walking
and breathing are safer, less trippy
or bullety experiences? Or upon raising
the temperature of the room, by which I mean
Indiana, by which I mean the Earth,
will your average citizen, think tank, president,
rodeo clown, bulldozer manufacturer, realize
Too much is enough and suggest we turn
the thermostat down? When I've asked
the oracle of the Magic Eight Ball, Is wisdom an idea
ahead of its time?, in nine
out of eight instances, the answer that floated up
through the blue, inky waters
of its mind: Signs Point To Yes.
Signs point to fire, flood, and drought.
To suffering on a scale
scientists refer to as "holy fuck."
I don't mean to suggest
we're missing the boat. I mean to shout
the boat is on fire, the life jackets
turned out to be sweater vests,
the escape plan is useless
when there's no there to get to
that isn't here. But I'm sorry,
I interrupted you: You were talking about the threat
of cock sucking, I think, or the death
of Christmas, or the dearth of good strip clubs
or mining or malls in Nome. I have trouble
remembering if circumcision
removes the foreskin or foresight.
Or both.
It's all downhill until it's flat or uphill
You're probably wondering
why I took up skateboarding at fifty eight
and not skeet shooting, bank robbing, teleporting.
So many gerunds: this is a very active poem.
It's almost sweating.
I took up skateboarding due to all the death
my wife and I have to come: her parents and mine.
I'm not very good. I fell and broke
a tulip yesterday. The day before, I got a ticket
for not acting my age. I don't know
any of the jargon, who the great skateboarders
of the Renaissance were, but the gear's cool
and motion distracts entropy
from my sagging flesh, which is to say,
a little bit of zoom
and the future doesn't exist. It's like being
the best watch in the world
made of bones and bits of rivers
and fear that I don't really love anyone,
but since watches have no then to them, only now,
I'm off the hook for all the guitar smashing
that goes on in my brain.
Is any of this true?
Probably not. Probably all of it. Probably
you don't like this commentary and I don't care
for purists or Puritans or sitting still
when I can be out there
testing my balance and perfecting a move
I call Muddling Through.
And there's this. Mom and dad—thank you.
I know you're worried
no one will visit your graves.
I am both no one who will
and no one who won't. And sometimes when I do
I'll let the weeds grow toward the sun,
and sometimes when I don't, the weeds will die
of their own accord. The mess it will be
is the surprise it has always been. Life.
This breathing of stars.
For love of the game
Early in the first quarter,
after an incomplete pass, we gathered
in the huddle and called Stephen Hawking
to ask, In an entropic system, what's the value
of ritualized violence? He thought
it was the huddle itself, that men pretended
for a moment a circle could hold them,
then tried to kill each other, then returned
to the circle, which is the moon, the womb,
a symbol of perfection as well as our desire
to achieve it. I tried to tell the cornerback
covering me how noble life is, but he thought
A Brief History of Time went on too long
and wasn't about to be distracted by my idea
that in failing to be perfect, we embody
the slight disruptions in DNA or alterations
in an environment that make evolution
possible. He felt every play
was a little version of The Big Bang,
an explosion into barely ordered disarray,
followed by collapse, and wished we'd go back
to talking about women or Greek Mythology
like in the old days, when football
was football and men cried only
when shot or their dogs died
or they realized that war
was their most memorable achievement.
I was so moved by his wisdom
that I could have kissed this guy
but facemasks make that impossible.
Fear of the homoerotic is why the facemask
exists, Susan Sontag explained
to the Green Bay Packers
when they called her on fourth and one
not long before she died
and they couldn't decide what men
are more afraid of, death or love? She said
fear of death is fear of love,
and to go for it, you Nancy boys.
Only one grandmother was lost in the filming of this poem
Extending a tightrope from my forehead
to your heart is a practical matter
of eyebolts and tension, says the engineer
in me.
The hula-hooper in me says round things
make the best toys, such as balls
and the wheel of life.
The undertaker in me can't stop staring
at the woman who asked, the day before she died,
if she were alive.
Imagine you're asked this question
by your ninety six year old grandmother
with your three year old son
at your side, who later, in the car
with your soft crying, crying
you're trying to bury
on the inside of your face, asks
the same thing: Mommy, am I alive?
The philosopher in me says it was genius
for her to stop in a little park
with breaking down picnic tables
and rusty swings and chase her son
in circles and figure eights, not knowing
her grandmother died while she was holding him
by his feet and swinging him
in a circle, while the priest in me
thought it holy that she let him go,
let him fly a few feet
into the sandbox that caught him
and gently gave him back, giggling
and all questions answered.
Eve
Though I am not her stethoscope,
she sanctions the wanderings of my ears
across her body, my listening
to the light sanding of wood
that is her breathing, to her closed eye
still warm from touching the moon.
And down there, where she turns into a Y,
it's fun to whisper into her cave
and listen for the echo coming back
changed. As when I said, My shadow
is a critique of my heart,
her vagina replied, You try too hard
to prove you exist, the best game of telephone
I've ever played, with any woman,
let alone a woman named
for the first woman
to run and run
until she realized
she could never be lost
because maps didn't exist.
And even if they had, she'd have made them.
And if she had made them,
they'd have been maps of water, to water,
by water and for water to use
to find its way back
to where water began, every one of them
left out in the rain.
Half past not yet
The cedars go up faster than the mountain
comes down. They're clocks
of a different feather. How much of the time
I spend thinking about time I'm wearing
a red shirt I can't say, not like why
the idea of bald Jesus
is funny: bald Jesus mocks our desperation
for eternity. If nothing lasts forever, absence
at least is something we can build our love
of the clarinet upon, a long note played out
like a rope behind a ship bound for the anywhere
of our mapless sleep. That's a sound that sounds
like it's trying to fill the very hole
it makes, just like everyone I care for is dying
not to die any more than they have to
at the end, when it'll turn out Orpheus was right
to turn around and look back at the past,
for to turn around and look back at the future
is to miss what hasn't happened yet, and every face
I adore is here now, fitting softly
between my rough hands.
Lights on, lights off
I know I couldn't pet our cat's paws
when she was young, but can now
after thirteen years together. I know wood smoke
makes the air smell warmer. I know I become elated
ten minutes after a first drink, melancholy
half an hour after a second. I know I've wasted
most of my life on consciousness, on counting
and tic-tac-toe. I know if you're going to stare
at a prostitute in a window in Amsterdam,
you should be naked too. And yes, I know
the sword of Damocles is stuck in my head. And no,
I don't know how it got there, when the thread
of happiness broke. And yes, it has complicated
my relationship with hats. And no, it doesn't hurt
except when I stand on my head. I like that we share
these epistemological interludes. Now, though,
I want to return to the dark, to waiting
for morning to touch everything in this room
and bring it all back to life
simultaneously, a resurrection
only the sun is capable of, having more fingers
than all the people now or ever alive. And yet,
despite this intimacy, what do I really know
about the sun, I mean personally?
An interpretation of what I hear in bird chatter
every morning
An extended group of interested parties—
me, Eve, Bryan, Eva, Jerry, Hamza,
the west branch of the Roanoke River,
the one monarch butterfly I've seen
in five years, this cloud and that cloud
and every cloud above your head
or in your heart, Tom, Janell, Susanna,
Buddha if he were here to let us kiss
and rub his silly belly, our orange cat Wee,
the strawberries killed last night
by frost, everyone in New York last week
speaking Spanish and Hindi, speaking the lean
of their bodies, speaking hunger and fear
and lust, all the poets banging their pots
and all the guitarists strumming their spines
and all the plumbers bringing streams
straight to our mouths and faces—
would like to know if that seat is taken,
if that bed is available, if a cab
has been called, if coyotes want to sing
with the band, and how much to tip
the deity, the chance that tumbled down
to all of this and everything that's coming,
to the floating
of a world so heavy with the rock
of itself, with all this life
and the bones of all former living,
through whatever space and time
turn out to be, beside
each other, and us
I'm a man, so this must be a manifesto
When we stand shoulder to shoulder
along the border and form a wall
of bear-hugging greeters and donors of single
red carnations and readers of the sixteenth part
of Song of Myself and kissers of dirt and sweat
on lips and foreheads and translators
of the cheeseburger and freeway, and ATM, APB
and QVC explainers and ask what your new country
can do for your new you and spill the beans
on a lake trying to be an ocean
in Chicago, on where to go
to be alone in Manhattan, and accept fear
in the eye as ID, and perform this rigorous
and righteous citizenship test:
where does your appetite go
when you sleep?,
and whether they say Idaho or I don't know or I've heard
there's no end to your sky or just shrug
in a language you don't speak, if you let them in,
I'd recognize you
under every possible disguise, hipster stash
or cowboy chaps or priestly collar
or maximally mini
made of hundred dollar bills,
whether your piercings have tats
or your tats are TVS or you've got skin
pure as the driven night or you're a mutt
born of unbordered fuckings
like most of us, born of the rivering rush
of flesh to get willy nilly and tumble down
and smiling if possible
from A to Z, you're American
and I'd hold your hand through any hurricane
or disruption in the force of our love
for an idea that can't be blabbed
but only lived, what the hell is democracy anyway
if not the rumble, the ramble, the scrum, the suck,
the bite, the reach, the retch, the scream, the song,
the falling, the rising, the coming and coming and coming
home of everyone
Float with me awhile
On my chest before surgery I wrote
I WANT MY SOUL BACK
on my knee
NOT THIS PLIÉ
on my head
THERE BE DRAGONS
and that was that: they inserted a sextant
in my thigh: I came out
better located, more alive.
I know how I'm going to die:
a train will hit a friend,
who'll call
bleeding out,
she'll speak Russian
at the end, my ear
her last chance
to think of home,
and I won't cry. Not then.
Not for seven years.
Until crossing a rope bridge
over a gorge in Brazil, all the not-crying
will break out, I'll convulse,
lose my balance, and fly, landing fine.
I'll die when no one believes
my flying is true,
after years of telling friends
and telemarketers,
Grief can make a body
light, not unlike a leaf
taped to a paper airplane
stapled to a wing, I think: research
is required.
Just as I wonder what it says
that I couldn't sketch
my wife's face to save her life.
Even with a gun to my head,
my heart's hand
would draw a blank.
And is it better to wish
on candles or stars? Candles
live on cake, whereas stars
are in the dark. Of this alone
I have no doubt:
some soon October, leaves
will stay where they are
so trees can fall. I am tired
of being tired.
I am a teapot, short and stout,
sometimes I whisper, too often shout
Two or three times a week
I feel such revulsion for the voice
in the air imitating the voice in my head
that I try to run or pogo-stick
away from myself, hoping to see a peaceful
and fun loving bonobo on Main Street
or bump into the cat who owes me sixty bucks
so I can hear the sound of three twenties
slipping home into my wallet. I mean
a real cat, not a man I'm calling a cat.
The terms of the loan are I pet the cat
behind the left ear and get scratched
from time to time so she can remind herself
civilization's a theory, not a fact.
I think it's that I hear myself
needing to be right, believing
I know how anything works, the dishwasher
or democracy or being
a human being and my voice
gets kind of fighty and needy
like rusted barbed wire
playing a flute. Bonobos
roll and giggle a ton
and I don't care if cat
ever pays me back, I consider
my sixty bucks an investment
in vomiting and scratching trees,
and no, I don't love myself, I tolerate
that I'm not dead yet and look forward
to tolerating my breath
as long as the candle in my heart's
into wax and then I want
to be happy for all of eternity
that I need not ever again express an opinion
on Proposition Six or feel dirty
because I couldn't resist
telling you that skirt
and that flame thrower clash.
Bob Hicok’s most recent book is Sex & Love & (Copper Canyon, 2016). Elegy Owed (Copper Canyon, 2013), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Bob Hicok
An acronym which by any other name is a sore
On the way to D.C., we drove by the NRA—
which stands for Nietzsche Read Aeschylus—
it's off 66 and glass box ugly, architecture
was killed or at least wounded by capitalism,
which is ironic, money being the primary reason
the NRA—which stands for Narcissistic
Rationalization Association—exists, I waved
and then it was gone and I didn't think
about the NRA—which stands for Nebulous Reality
Adaptations—until we visited Lincoln,
who was shot, you might recall, not far
from where he was turned to stone, though maybe
you don't recall, we Americans aren't big
on history, or vegemite sandwiches,
or gun laws, visited in the morning
when no one was there, before we'd begun
slipping in and out of the various Smithsonian's
for free, going from space travel to dinosaurs
to Degas, the Mall is democratic
in its seduction of our minds, and I thought
of Booth and how the NRA—which stands for Never
Reasonably Accountable—would say,
If only Mrs. Lincoln had been packing,
then got back to admiring the man in the chair,
and the sculptor who made him so big,
and Pickens County, Georgia, for producing
such lovely marble, and even the NRA,
for that matter—which stands for
National Ritual Absolution—is inspiring
the way a great white shark is, the NRA—
which stands for National Racial Attenuation—
is a great white shark, never sleeping,
always eating, always ready to defend
the right of certain people to die
November 8, 2016
Now I see the damage an earthquake does
to faces—something falls out—
whatever struts there are in our smiles
are knocked away—eyes pace
in the head—there's this taste of plaster
in everything I say and the crunch of bones
in everything said to me—but as much language
as we bring to ruins, a week in, it remains
a startled life of kindling—
I'm still putting an ear to the ground
to autopsy the rumble so I can hear it coming
retroactively and not be here at all,
if that makes sense and you too
are human—but at least I've begun
picking up old books and holding each one
ridiculously like a child in my arms—
begun saying goodbye to the crushed bed
and window and sock—to imagine rubble
as loam—as when someone
you love dies, and you dream them
twice as tall and eight times as often
bending to your ear and kissing
the tip of it like a leaf finding its way
to a stream—though there's the small gift
that mirrors are shattered, and the shock
to our self-regard forces us to look
for ourselves in each others' eyes—
and as much as we struggle
to inventory the harm, the only true list
of what we've lost is what we'll build
Epic
My super power is the thought, Eve should be in my arms
when she's afraid, and there she is, safe, full of bones
and blood and going nowhere if I have anything
to say about it. Vice versa applies when I'm afraid,
this is our pact, that we'll hold each other
before we hold a door or gun, feather or piece
of a star, if we're ever lucky enough to be walking along
and trip over a discarded chunk of heaven.
I can also make anything below eight thousand pounds
levitate, but in comparison, that power is whimsical
and irrelevant to my emotional makeup, I can take or leave
making things float and fly, but I can't leave Eve.
My whole life has been an argument with the saying,
You're born alone and you die alone, as I suspect
my mother was there, otherwise, why has she taken credit
for the melding of my spirit and flesh, if we go
with the old-school notion of human beings
as a combo pack of soul and guts. You're born
into a relay race of affection if you're lucky, handed
from cherishing to cherishing and likewise
carry others as far as you can, until they ask
to be set down or you get tired, and then,
after a long struggle or just a few seconds
of looking at a donkey in a field eating alfalfa,
you die. There are other sequences, of course—
I'm exhausted, not exhaustive—but I'm pretty sure
I've made my point or at least acted convincingly
like I have one, though I'm not sure of much.
Does this sound familiar: one day, I found myself
looking in a mirror and thinking, Well I guess I'm you,
after which I went at the list someone put in my hand,
crossing items off only to have them appear again,
suggesting that the people who say It's a process
aren't just annoying but smug and we should ask them
to leave the pool. With thrashing this deeply
at the core of the endeavor, clinging
and being clung to aren't just romantic,
they're what static has been telling us to do,
and I refuse to ignore the physical laws of the universe,
especially the one about the Conversation
of Matter—that everything is speaking to us
all the time, we're just too busy to listen.
You don't remember that one from school?
Maybe you were absent or absent minded that day,
or it was wrongly presented as the Conservation
of Matter, that misguided notion that energy
is neither created or destroyed. I've created
a shit-ton of energy with Eve, that's a British measure
equal to 2,300 pounds, and plan to keep on
making this stuff up as we go, the going
being the most important part of any journey
or think piece or life, this thing I find myself
in or of, needing or kneading or both, be it desire
or bread I'm after, the love of a good woman
or bad star, as long as there's light,
I'm going to stand here clinging to the feet
of my shadow, and in the dark, hold its place,
as I would for any stranger in any line.
Elections have consequences
and confetti on one side, not the other
Suddenly I'm surrounded by republicans.
The president. Congress. The senate.
Three quarters of the governors
and state legislatures are red.
I kissed my wife last night
and she tasted like Richard Nixon.
The country's more republican
than I am Bob. I'm all Bob
in one sense, but in another,
I'm half Virginia and half Hershel,
so the math checks out. So what becomes
of checks and balances now?
Imagine asking yourself,
Do you think my ideas are brilliant
or merely inspired?
Republicans will be able to drill
for oil in my bedroom if they want.
Who'll stop them—me? Marcel Marceau?
Buddha? That guy's too chubby
and fictitious. But now they've done it—
the poets are mad. This means
the painters are furious
at having to listen to the poets.
Soon people who sell art supplies
will be livid that the painters
spend so much time hiding from the poets
and not painting color field portraits
of nudes. But how do you paint
a color field portrait of a nude?
O look—I just got distracted
by my own poem. I begin to understand
why liberals are out of power.
Republicans don't wonder
how to paint color field portraits
of nudes. They recognize
a trick question when they are one.
They see the chance to tell women
what to do with their babies
and take it. They know it's finally time
to give the long-suffering rich
the hand-job of a tax break. But what
am I really saying?
I guess that I'm at a loss
for a rudder, as it requires
first and foremost a boat,
and I am what technically
is referred to as drowning. Or this
isn't over by any means necessary
measures will be taken as a whole
the center will not hold me closer
tiny dancer in the dark-
ness falls on those who don't
check their flashlight batteries
first, everyone check
your flashlight batteries first
and then repeat after me—
America is the greatest
and messiest country
because whoever wants to be
one of us gets to be
on the team. Did I just say
suck your left-leaning thumb
one more week and then
get back to work? No,
I did not. Two days, tops.
In 2032, I try to explain 2016
White men were scared.
The clerks selling them Slurpees
wore turbans or spoke Spanish. Having complained
for decades about moochers on food stamps,
many of them were moochers on food stamps.
A wave of foreclosures sent hundreds
of thousands of families
into apartments full of Chinese drywall
laced with formaldehyde. Beyoncé
was more famous than Faith Hill.
The most common job for a white guy
who didn't go to college
was driving something somewhere
for someone else to buy. Imagine
what the idea of driverless cars
did to that guy's sleep. The world was turning
more black and brown. More expensive
and black and brown and urban
and black and brown and complicated
with robots and cell phones and drones
and black and brown. Women were saying,
I can do that. I can lift that, write that,
invent that, cure that. Women
were pouring in over the transom
and through the clouds. White men
had been the stars of the show.
The ticket to the big dance
was being a white guy
and it was all slipping away.
So one last time, white men said,
This is ours. This land is ours.
They voted for a libido.
For a mouth.
They voted for bragging.
They saw narcissism and voted
for the bright shiny ego
on a hill.
Fortunately I used to play hockey
so I had automatic Canadian citizenship.
I moved to Montreal.
I opened a coffee shop
not far from Cirque du Soleil.
I learned French so I could be polite
in two languages.
Time passed. The more
black and brown people
became even more more
black and brown people
mixed with white people
mixed with everyone's love of salsa.
People started putting salsa
on everything. Pizza. X-ray results.
Communion hosts. So I moved back
and you were born in the united
United States. If you think of democracy
as the people getting their way, sometimes
that way is crazy: what you've read
is true—we elected a president
who bragged that he could touch
a woman's vagina without asking.
He even put that on official
White House stationary:
President Donald Trump:
Touching Your Daughter's Pussies
Whenever I Want For Over Thirty Years.
Don't let anyone tell you America
didn't invent him. We did.
And the next time people think
nothing like that could ever happen,
we'll do it again.
Flight plan
I like to think I have a wing
inside myself, and if a wing,
that I've swallowed Icarus whole,
wax and all, in the moment
before the sun treats him
as an equal. There's a poem about him
I love about a painting about him
I plan to stand before
before I die, flapping my arms
until the docent comes over
in his sturdy shoes and holds a mirror
so I can touch-up my lipstick
before kissing the splash Icarus made
in the ocean going home. I have
all these plans to make plans
and all these desires to be brave
about the fall awaiting us all,
but I never quite get there,
like a man trying to leap
out of his tracks in snow. When
he lands, the first person
to welcome him back to Earth
looks so much like the person
he tried to leave behind,
that he leaps again, and spends
half of the rest of his life
landing, half in the air.
The point of life
is to go out and put my arms
around a horse. While it might appear
from the road I'm cheating
on my wife, I'm cheating
at not being sad that I'm a person
by holding the pulse of a horse
against my ear. I've also rested a cloud
against my ear at the top of a mountain,
and the bottom of a mountain
against my ear by laying down
and listening for the Earth
grinding its teeth. I usually
bring a carrot I pulled up myself
from where it was hiding in the ground,
the horse always eats the carrot
I usually bring, this is certainly
almost certainty in a world famous
for making up its mind every second
who lives and dies, who looks good
in plaid or in the back of a squad car,
crying. The owner of the horse
doesn't know I've stolen her dew
on my pants or kissed her horse's neck
while wind stirs the shadows of grass,
I don't know if I flew as a boy
on the horse outside the grocery store
my mother always let me ride,
she'd put a coin in and go shop
and the horse would try hard
to run away and set both of us free:
when it couldn't, I'd settle
for finding my mother a little later
holding a can of something
trying to keep us alive.
I'd like the woman who owns the horse
and my mother, who'll always
have dibs on me, to meet.
While they talk, the horse and I
will continue our thought experiment:
if a man only seems himself
clearly in the brown mirror
of a horse's eyes, is he reborn
every time she blinks?
The dichotomy lobotomy
In the old argument
over left versus right, nature
versus rapture, nurture
versus murmur, bullet
versus ballot, ballot
versus mallet, power
versus sharing, money
versus gimme gimme gimme, screaming
versus what did you say,
I try to listen to both sides
of the wind as I pedal my bike
up a mountain to see
what I can see. Which is trees,
mostly. Trees up close
and in the distance, trees.
Green here and green there
and green green green
between. All under a hat
of blue sky. Versus, hearses, curses:
nothing good rhymes
with versus. Nurses, I guess.
Nurses with purses.
I was wrong. Humility
versus humidity. Ears
versus jeers. Love
is to livid
as kissing is
to pissing on. Middle ground
versus middle finger.
Bob Hicok's most recent book is Sex & Love & (Copper Canyon, 2016). Elegy Owed (Copper Canyon, 2013), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. nalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.