by Bob Hicok
or knuckle, and last night
reading your poem
in the almost-dark, with three deaths
on my mind, of who
who cares, the only difference
between my dead and yours
is everything, I got to this
and regretted I didn’t —
“That nothing on and on, huge
and years, weighs
about nothing like
a whistle’s sweet because
it’s distant” —
and consider all the jars
I wasted, holding then and still
screws and jams
and more thorough nothings,
when of whomever she gray
and gutted was, there could still
be a smidge in the fridge, in my life, sick
but so are language and memory, which never
let the living let the dead die
Owe is to ode as whatever is to I don’t know
I owe the crow, I know. Owe the watch,
the wrist, the swatch, the fist,
the sock, the crow, I know. Without clouds
I’d stand alone, without house
and switch and bomb and lock
and pick, there’d be no boom, no breaking in
to song for the crow, I know.
Owe every needle said no
to my arm, every leaf said yes
to the wind in my ear, owe wind
again, wind again
in this poem for the crow, I know.
When I’m dead, I want my head
to be an ashtray
in a bus station, tagged
at will by slugs and mugs
bound for Poughkeepsie and Kankakee,
my hips plunked into your garden
in lieu of my lips, after my kiss
is flown away by the hunger
of the crow, go crow. Owe maggots
for flies, flies for buzz, buzz
for saw, saw for seen, scene for action,
action for cut, cut for cure, cure
for sure, sure for shore, shore
for more, more for moon, moon
for flashlighting the night,
which falls softly
as the word softly
falls, and is wall-to-wall
crow, you know.
Ode to ongoing
People are having babies. Hoisting their children
to tree limbs on their backs and tying their shoes.
Telling them what the numerator is and why not
to eat one’s boogers or not publicly
pee if at all possible to pee in private.
People are mixing their genes after wine
in romantic alleys and London hotels after crossing
a famous bridge. Trying to save for college
and not hit their children like they were hit
and not hit their children differently
than they were hit and failing and succeeding.
People are singing to wombs and playing the Goldberg
variations to fetuses who’ll love Glenn Gould
without knowing who Glenn Gould is. I’m driving
along or painting a board or wondering
if we love animals because we can’t talk with them
more intimately than we can’t talk with God
and the whole time there’s this background hum
of sex and devotion and fear, people telling
good-night stories or leaving their babies
in dumpsters but mostly working hard
to feed the future what it needs to grow strong
and prefer sweet over sour, consonance
to dissonance, to be the only creatures who notice
the stars or at least use them metaphorically
to go on and on about the longing we harbor
in such tiny spaces relative to the extent
of our dread that we’re in this alone.
Elegy to the time it takes to realize the futility of elegies
Had I only dipped you in amber, only built an ark
and filled it with one of your kind, only been God
or a surgeon who was God or raised an army
of fire ants and bulldozers at the door
against what was coming, they say goldfish
forget immediately the circled bowl, they say elephants
come back to the bones of their dead and lift them
with their trunks, I did none of these things, forget
or lift your bones with my trunk, I like it here
in the fog, being touched by the cool washcloth
of the sky, had I only folded you into a triangle
like a flag that has thrashed all day
inside the monologue of the wind and needs to sleep,
never letting you touch the ground, coming to you
with my hand over my heart, pledging vibrancy
and odors and sunspots, I’m sorry for the snot
at the end, my face full of sheepshank knots
and nails, had I only been an ocean for you,
just a little one, a closet wide, a bedpan deep,
plenty of infinity for your fuse, your hovering,
the truth is I did all of these things, and let go
the steering wheel on the highway until the rumble strip
called me a dumbass, and chopped a tree down
and built a crib for a child, I like it here
when the fog erases itself and says, I offer you
the world freshly painted, including the woods
where you walked, if only I could weigh its shade,
would it be larger or smaller by exactly
the size of you, O science, give me such instruments
of knowledge, they are as passionately useless as poems.
Love
Lev and Svetlana are science students at Moscow University.
They fall in love. World War II happens. Lev goes to war and is captured
by the Germans. After the war, denounced by fellow Russians
who heard him speaking German, Lev is sentenced to death for treason,
his sentence commuted to ten years in the gulag. I am so far sorry
for Lev and Svetlana but not amazed. My amazement begins when Svetlana
breaks into the gulag, not once but several times, to see and touch Lev.
I have lived for three weeks as a man who knows this thing was done,
have washed dishes and dug a trench trying to imagine her first step
after closing the door, the first step Svetlana took under the power
of the thought, I am going to sneak into the gulag. I felt I knew the world
and then found out it contained that first step and every next step
toward guns and dogs and the Arctic Circle, it made me so happy
that she did this that I dug a better trench and washed cleaner plates
and tried to think of a place on my wife’s body I’d never kissed.
I thought of such a place and kissed her there and explained
why kissing her there was the least I could do to show the world
I have a new and more generous understanding of life: I will get drunk
and throw knives at clouds but also kiss my wife’s darkest privacy
to demonstrate I am willing to convert reverence to deed.
After I told my wife the story of Lev and Svetlana, she went to the ground
and put her hands around a dead plant and screamed at it to try harder,
she looked foolish and I loved her even more and joined her in screaming
at death, it made me feel Russian and obstinate and eternal, all good things
to feel, and where I kissed her isn’t necessarily where you’re thinking: maybe
miles into her ears and not with lips but words.
Elegy ode
Low clouds on the mountain about as high
as stars on
top of a five-story building are
when I’ve gone up the fire escape
in my brain, where everything
is a mist and a slow wet kiss
meanders across the horizon
as the day’s version of time, how I’ll know
I haven’t died has never been clear, it’s raining
harder now than all the cups
I’ll ever drink from could hold, a thirty-
by-thirty roof can fill a fifty-five-gallon rain barrel
after one-tenth of one inch of rain, I am a harvest
of such listenings to rivers and oceans
coming back to us from the sky, where they’ve gone
is where we see ourselves going, where everything
is a mist and a slow wet kiss
leads me back where I began, my father
leaning against my mother in a doorway, in a hurry, in a year
they’ll be dead or ten, some soon
is the lit fuse trailing each of us, the clouds
like a wedding ring around the mountain
gone as of eight lines ago, I’ve been missing them
secretly before your eyes, as when we meet
and you say things or just stand there
helping your clothes not fall down, I’ve no clue
why mind-reading never caught on, I would page
after page of you and dog-ear and marginalia
is after all love, is tracks and we have come
as far in this moment as we might ever get, if this is the end,
I’m enjoying that crows haven’t changed their story,
if this is the end, I have successfully
never worn cargo pants, if this is the end, I can admit
the orgy I’ve been trying to have
with everything leads naturally
to melancholia, for who has such long arms
as that, tongue as that, and to draw
one atom in is to let another go, I am afraid
I would try to name them all, how many Sallys
and Petes would that be, how many Keshons,
how many dust motes do I come across and feel
I’m being rude to by not adoring
more personally, more like the last chance
every chance is
Confessions of a nature lover
Back then I was going steady
with fog, who could dance
like no one’s business, I threw her over
for a leaf that one day fluttered
first her shadow then her whole life
into my hand, that’s a lot
of responsibility and a lot
of relatives, this leaf
and that leaf and all the other leaves
hung around, I told her
I needed space, which was true,
without it, I’d only be a soul
and no one’s sure that wisp
is real, that’s why we say
of real estate, location, location,
location, and of speech,
locution, locution, locution,
and of love, yes, yes, yes,
I am on my knees, will you have me,
world?
Circles in the sky
Dead things here
get a fan club
of vultures. It’s cunning
to watch the sky admit
it wants to eat.
One vulture
tells another
tells another, theirs
is the largest wingspan
of sharing I have known.
What they’ll do
to my once-dear
fence-leaping deer
is make it a dun sack
between road
and river engaging
in their voyages.
At least this hovering
of truly ugly birds
unless you look at them
metaphorically
reminds me to think
of someone I love
and prove it.
So if your phone rings
in a bit, it could be
sort of death calling
to ask, How’s it going,
as I sort of hope
you’ll be life answering,
Fine.
Something like an oath
It would be beautiful to wear a hat
of moonlight along the shops on a sunny day
when everyone has unpacked their faces
of work. Hopping on one stilt. Dragging the sea
behind me like a child with a puppy.
I have been a fence too long. I have kept a hive
for a head and kissed you with bees, and whispered
stings. It would be beautiful to hold a contest
for the eyes most like an opened jail cell.
I am tired of proving my heart a grenade.
It makes no sense when we are surrounded by fields
of genitals. It makes no peace to hammer
all day with my scowls against your temples.
I have been the calendar called Monday Monday Monday.
I have breathed like I’m swimming with an unrung
bell tied around my ankles. When I say my name
I hear a burned-down church. I have been
a dead crow shaving in the mirror. I have treated
the afterbirth better than my child.
It would be beautiful to go to the butcher’s
and put the cow back together with vines
and semen and applause. No more axe handles
taking the place of ballerinas. No more apologizing
for the rudeness of bombs. Either we mean
to blow arms off or we don’t. Either we have acid
in our veins or feathers or I am not a doctor.
I am afraid and swinging a pillowcase
full of doorknobs over my head to hold my place
on a rock a Roman stood on and thought,
I could conquer this, I could teach this wind
to bow. It would be beautiful to be the wind
saying, fat chance. To put the doorknobs back
on doors that once were trees we climbed
to be like our heroes, the birds and the sun
and the night was this huge kite I promised
myself I would one day hold the string of.
Elegy owed
In other languages
you are beautiful — mort, muerto — I wish
I spoke moon, I wish the bottom of the ocean
were sitting in that chair playing cards
and noticing how famous you are
on my cell phone — picture of your eyes
guarding your nose and the fire
you set by walking, picture of dawn
getting up early to enthrall your skin — what I hate
about stars is they’re not those candles
that make a joke of cake, that you blow on
and they die and come back, and you,
you’re not those candles either, how often I realize
I’m not breathing, to be like you
or just afraid to move at all, a lung
or finger, is it time already
for inventory, a mountain, I have three
of those, a bag of hair, box of ashes, if you
were a cigarette I’d be cancer, if you
were a leaf, you were a leaf, every leaf, as far
as this tree can say
Missing
I look forward to your tracks in snow
walking on their own down the mountain
while I think of you at the window
as someone who just hasn’t called in a while,
having less and less an image of you
than a need to ask the fog
to come in and sit to tea, to solid motions
like integers hammering the world together.
You’re not even pieces anymore,
not even bone scraps, and when I try to picture you,
my memory kills you all over again. A few
of the actual pictures I’d tattoo
to the parable of breath: the one that holds
the shadow of your hair against your cheek
for ransom, the one that stares at the back
of your head, the one of you on a cliff,
beyond which an island of bird shit
with seals warming their daily somnolence
reminds me of love and other misreadings
of nature, all of them versions of me
ironing the sky to wear to the séance
I keep wanting the wind
stuck on a barbed wire fence to be.
Imagination says things like that
without knowing what they mean. It means
there’s all this wind and barbed wire
I don’t know what to do with, that so far,
you’ve performed your tasks
as a dead person admirably, being no where
I’ve looked for you except barely in words
that just now dug up an apple tree
and moved it up the mountain, closer to rain.
As I was saying
Long, thin clouds like the sky is smoking.
I tell it to stop or share, it doesn’t
stop or share, this is what happens
to my requests: they rise.
When I was a kid, a neighbor man
had a few and tied a cherry bomb
to a pigeon, it flew furiously
until kaboom. Feathers and bits
of what made the pigeon go
landed on the Smitky twins
playing hopscotch, they looked up,
I looked at them looking up, two of everything
the same, like their parents
knew the odds of needing a spare.
My wife wants to fly in a hot air balloon.
I say to her, I’ll wait here
with the turtles. I try to save them
from getting squished when they cross the road.
They don’t know it’s a road or what a road
is for, getting away is what a road is for,