Elegy Owed

by Bob Hicok

  then coming back, then wondering why

  you came back is what a road is for.

  My wife’s people are Ukranian, beets

  are important to them. I tried to arm wrestle

  her father once, he said, Why

  would I do that: if I beat your arm

  the rest of you will want revenge.

  The other day, some kids

  knocked a ball through our window,

  one of them asked for it back, I said Sure,

  if you give me the bat. He did,

  then he asked for the bat, I said

  If you give me the ball,

  he started to hand it over

  when I saw understanding

  bloom in his face. That never happened

  for me: understanding blooming in my face.

  Not the way I wanted it to. So I’ll die

  and someone will have to deal

  with what’s left, the body, the shoes,

  the socks. The last person on Earth

  will just be dead: not buried or mourned

  or missed. Like with kites, I cut the string

  when they’re way up,

  because who’d want to come back?

  So somewhere are all these kites,

  like somewhere are all the picture frames

  from the camps, and the bows

  from hair, and the hair itself

  I saw once in a museum, some of it,

  in a room all its own, as if one day

  the heads would come back and think,

  That’s where I put you, like I do

  with keys when I find them in my hand.

  Speaking American

  When he learned I’m a poet he asked if I knew

  this other poet. We don’t all know each other,

  I told him after he informed me she likes cheese

  similes. Love is like cheese, time is like cheese,

  cheese is surprisingly like cheese. Then I said,

  I know this poet, and he went, See. “He went, see”

  means he said see, see, but you know that

  if you’re American and alive. I explained

  that “I know this poet” means “I know her work,”

  when he was like, Work? “When he was like”

  is like “he went,” which is past tense of “he goes,”

  in case you’re from another country and confused

  by our lack of roundabouts. But poetry isn’t work,

  he said, unless you’re talking about reading it.

  But I’m not talking about reading it, I went,

  in a moment that was the future past of everything

  I’d do from then on. Such as snag the last

  of the hyacinth cookies and step onto the veranda

  to be awed by stars. Where I went, It’s hard work,

  to be awed by stars: they’re just little lights

  about which we learn a song as children.

  And he was like, But I do wonder what they are,

  as both of us lifted our heads like birds

  waiting for our mother to throw up in our mouths.

  When I shared the image, he was like, Gross,

  but then he went, You’re right, that’s what we do,

  we expect the sky to feed us. This led

  to a long discussion about yearning

  in which the word “yearning” never appeared,

  in which he went and I went and he was like

  and I was like and the stars

  kept doing what the song says they do,

  because “burn your hydrogen burn your hydrogen

  little star” doesn’t fit the diatonic harmony

  that pivots on an opposition between tonic and dominant

  in a tune derived from “Ah! Vous Dirai-Je, Maman.”

  Then a woman came out wearing a red dress

  the size of a whisper, lit a smoke

  and the smoke’s smoke acted all floaty

  and sexy and better than us, and she was like,

  Want one? and we were like, Yes.

  Moving day

  When it’s time, the hotels of Ardmore no longer interesting

  in their facades, the small bags of peanuts you used to buy

  suddenly twice as big, as if someone far away, looking

  out a window at a barge, had thought your appetite

  was asking to be doubled, and the little girl you showed

  how to affix playing cards to her spokes has gone off

  to college, that school where anthrax arrived in a letter

  and killed the chemistry professor whose face on TV

  looked so small, like he’d been the head of a doll,

  when you cried, fully and stupidly alone in your room,

  literally into your hands, wiping the snot on your cat,

  knowing this would set her about licking for hours, this spite

  after emotion, you recognized it first when you were seventeen,

  when you bit Sharon, not hard enough to break skin

  but trust certainly was lost, and why, because she said

  That must have been hard about military school, no longer

  interesting because you’ve cataloged their moods, the different

  shadows of the different cornices, the wrought-iron gate

  so recently improved no longer sings when it opens, and you

  should go, a whole new city, boxes of your life

  staying closed, most of them, in stacks of who were you

  after all, really, when it comes down to it, this collection

  of how you said “shows to go you” to the magazine guy, of wearing

  the apricot slippers, so have no set phrases, give your feet

  a choice, I know, it’s tiring, to be new, to even try, who am I

  to judge, look at me, my head shaped just like yesterday,

  and this appointment with language I keep, as if eventually

  a handle will appear, and the sound of me saying I’ll turn it

  will be me turning it, to what, some sense of an other side,

  which if you touch it first in your new home, in the away,

  call me, the description, even with its holes, the torn edges

  where to say a thing is to rip it, will be everything to me,

  the beautiful frays.

  Excerpts from mourning

  Holding warm bear shit in my hand.

  Thinking people like me

  are weak who want to believe in angels

  and people like me are stupid who refuse to believe

  in angels.

  Wanting to make love

  to a rosary in a nun’s hand.

  Admiring the vertebra

  of a cow on the table next to roses, roses beside keys,

  four belonging to doors I don’t recall

  slamming or walking through or painting colors

  of welcome, the music of absence

  when I shake the keys, the absence of music

  when I don’t.

  Heating a knife on the stove

  and touching my forearm three times and living

  with a scar resembling a cactus as the only painting

  on my body.

  Carrying ash of you to the Atlantic

  (Kittery), bonebits to the Pacific (Point Lobos), giving you

  to seals and otters and pollution, to waves and forgetting

  and whales.

  Wondering if I am inventing you

  by remembering you or remembering you by writing of you

  as silence sleeping inside a nest of shadow and hair.

  Of breath

  and shadow and hair.

  Life

  People in rooms drinking tea, drinking wine

  in the same rooms and outdoors, taking trains

  and driving and planting tomatoes

  and harvesting tomatoes, kissing

  or watching others kiss while wanting to be kissed,

&n
bsp; a spider living by the stove

  as tigers and grizzly bears roam Ohio

  being killed after their owner

  opened their cages and shot himself,

  people talking about childhood

  while holding babies, hands behind the heads

  that can’t support their own weight,

  eating lunch and other meals at tables,

  sitting at other tables smoking or wanting to smoke,

  having a beer in a room before a funeral

  and a beer in the same room after the funeral,

  a spider living in the window as a woman

  cuts all her hair off in Nome and mails it

  to her mother’s chemoed head in Memphis,

  people going on too long and people

  letting people go on too long,

  standing in a doorway meeting the lover

  of their son, taking her coat, her scarf, offering tea,

  liking her smile, people drinking too much

  and people letting people drink too much,

  making beds for them, helping them in,

  people sitting beside people under trees,

  trees under clouds, clouds under sun, sun under

  whatever sun is under and beyond reproach.

  Sunny, infinite chance of rain

  I don’t want her to die.

  She doesn’t want her mother to die.

  Five minutes after we were married, her father died.

  The limo drove us to the hospital.

  She stood in her veil at the side of his bed.

  A nurse congratulated us.

  We didn’t know what words to put in our mouths

  so we left our mouths empty.

  I think of us as the top of a wedding cake

  standing guard over the door his body had become.

  She doesn’t want me to die.

  The Buddha said we shouldn’t want anything but the Buddha

  wanted us to believe that.

  At the funeral, she wore a tricycle being pushed by her father

  when she was five, her legs out to the side.

  That’s only true in this poem, like the cloud I’m looking at

  is only true in this sky.

  In all other skies, this cloud is a lie.

  It’s about to rain, not in the poem but in the thinking

  that led to the poem,

  the poem that helped me recall

  I can still touch her entire body,

  the soft parts, hard parts, bendy parts, all the places she’ll hide

  from everyone but me.

  Everyone but the doctor and me, the doctor

  and mortician and me.

  In lieu of building a crib

  for W

  The day my child was born, I cut my hair off,

  it came down to my waist, tied and twisted it

  into a doll I gave her when she was strong enough

  to hold a crow in each hand, You looked

  like an ampersand when you were born, I told her,

  we were under a tree, I’d been touching her toes

  and saying toe, touching her head and saying

  star, she clutched the hair-doll and did that thing

  babies do, swallow us with the wells

  of their eyes, I was never real until her stare

  asked me to breathe all the way to the bottom

  of my life, I’d been the cloud in the picture

  of the baseball team, the brown scarf no one claimed

  after the party, that seemed to float there

  on its own, told her, One day we’ll burn that doll,

  it will brush the hour with smoke, it will mean hello

  to a giant far away, she listened like a mirror, we have

  the same expression of mind on our faces, the same

  shadow of wondering in our eyes, told her, This

  is air, it adores you, this is sky, it wants to be

  a house, this is grass and grass is the color

  of the promise I made with your mother, or maybe

  I didn’t say these things but thought

  I’d been falling and someone pulled the ripcord

  and here I am, a leaf on the ground

  Equine aubade

  Consider how smart

  smart people say horses are.

  I love waking

  to a field of such intelligence, only pigs

  more likely to go to MIT, only dew

  harboring the thoughts of clouds

  upon the grass and baptizing

  the cuffs of my pants as I walk

  among the odes. Long nose

  of a thousand arrows

  bound together in breath, each flank

  a continent of speed, this one

  quiet as a whisper

  into a sock, this one

  twitchy as a sleeper

  dreaming the kite string

  to her shadow has snapped. Old now

  to my ways, they let me touch

  their voltage, the bustling waves

  of atoms conscripted to their form, this one

  even allowing my ear to her side

  so I can elope

  with her heartbeat. I often feel

  everything is applause, an apparition

  of the surprise of existence,

  that the substances of life

  aren’t copper and lithium, fire

  and earth, but the gasp

  and its equivalents, as when rain falls

  on a hot road

  and summer sighs. Or the poem

  feels that, it’s hard to tell

  my mind from the poem’s, the real

  from the lauded horses, there’s always

  this dualism, this alienation

  of word from word

  or time from thrust

  or window from greed. I am eager

  to ride a horse out of the field, out of language,

  out of the county

  and to the sea, where whichever one of us

  is the better swimmer

  will take over, in case you see a horse

  on the back of a man

  from where you are

  on your boat, looking at the horizon

  in the late and dawdling company

  of a small but faithful star.

  I tell myself the future

  When my father dies, naturally I’ll want to call him

  and tell him my father has died, he won’t pick up, I’ll decide

  he’s out raking leaves, that leaves are sullen, that I’m hungry,

  that my father hasn’t died, and when he finally answers,

  I’ll stand in the kitchen wondering why I called, most

  of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich completed,

  all that will remain is for the parts to be joined, the jelly

  to the peanut butter wing, I’ll tell my father

  I’m cooking, he’ll nod and I’ll hear him nod

  Good-bye

  Small white church at the edge of my yard.

  A bell will ring in a few hours.

  People who believe in eternity will sing.

  I’ll hear an emotion resembling the sea from over a hill.

  One time I sat with my back to the church to give their singing

  to my spine, there’s a brown llama you can watch

  while you do this in a field if you’d like to try.

  I don’t think even calendars believe in eternity.

  Beyond the church is a trail that leads to a bassinet in a tree.

  Someone put it there when the oak and sky were young.

  I’m afraid to climb the tree.

  That I’ll find bones inside.

  That they’ll be mine.

  I want to be with my wife forever but not as we are.

  She’ll become a bear, I a season: Kodiak, spring.

  Part of loving bagpipes haunting the gloaming is knowing

  the bloodsinging will sto
p.

  Beyond the church I pulled a hammer from the river.

  What were you building, I asked its rust, from water and without nails?

  This is where I get self-conscious about language,

  words are love affairs or séances or harpoons, there isn’t a sentence

  that isn’t a plea.

  This is where I don’t care that I’m half wrong when I say everything

  is made entirely of light.

  This is where my wife and I hold hands.

  Over there is where our shadows do a better job.

  About the Author

  Bob Hicok’s This Clumsy Living won the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress. Recipient of five Pushcart Prizes, a Guggenheim, and two NEA Fellowships, his poetry has been selected for inclusion in eight volumes of The Best American Poetry, including The Best of The Best American Poetry. This is his eighth book.

  Books by Bob Hicok

  Words for Empty and Words for Full

  This Clumsy Living

  Insomnia Diary

  Animal Soul

  Plus Shipping

  The Legend of Light

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank the editors and staff of the following magazines and websites for publishing some of the poems that appear in this book:

  The American Poetry Review, The Believer, Blackbird, Blip Magazine, Conduit, diode, Fifth Wednesday Journal, The Good Men Project, Green Mountains Review, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Lo-Ball, Narrative, New England Review, Octopus Magazine, The Offending Adam, The Paris Review, Poemeleon, Scythe, The Southern Review, Swink, and Vinyl Poetry.