Bob Hicok

Odyssey

I sat in different places with different winds:
at the top of the drive where the blue weeds grow;
on the bench with hammering, the sound of a house
I couldn't see being built in the woods, child
of a green womb. Rain was coming, clouds a scarf
thrown across the sun. There might not be a spot
that wants me, I could wander my yard
and never fit this grass, the fence of rusted holes.
Beside the tongue of a shovel left out over night,
I laid my head, my fingers four more dreams
a daddy-longlegs touched in a blind world,
there's that longer leg that's not a leg,
it's a telegram sent out before the progress of a shadow.
The feel of things, if I cherish, helps me live
more like a minute than a clock. Rain crossed
my neighbor's field at the speed of a million mouths
per second kissing corn. Just before my house,
it stopped, then started on the other side of my life
with a sound like the valley being told to hush.
At the mailbox, I saw the mailbox had been beaten again,
I sat, looked down the road at the fallen loaves
of metal bread. This is a ritual like dinner,
like wanting to know the secret the bat tells the hands
of the boy who leans out of a car, lit by radio glow
and a cigarette. In some, the refrain of blood
is swing away. If you put your ear to such a person,
you hear the ocean saying let me out. Some days,
it takes me a year to get the mail, to return home
with proof that we owe. There's a stick
I've had my eye on, I'll ask tomorrow
if it's ever considered being thrown.

Panhandling discourse

We beg differently in Bombay than New York.
I sense there's no link, between days, between the flowers
on this hill and the flowers I might imagine
on the train that my hands would arrange
if given a little country of their own. That was tomorrow
that this happened, that I thought of a way
into dirt, to breed color and a fragrance
like the inside of the sun. This is why
I'm looking forward to you, this is why people
are my bibliography. Once you feel
it's your own hand floating beside your head,
that you're walking in beautiful if dirty robes
beside your beautiful if clean suit, that the money
you give, you give to your own mouth, there's no breeze
you can't name. If I leave myself in the rain
often enough, one time I'll come back and I'll be gone.
Dying is the only way to live, and a dollar
only costs a dollar. Every twenty seventh word
should be absolutely. Think of the agreements
that would break out like fire touching air
with all the fingers it can muster. Can you spare
some change? Absolutely. Would you like
to touch my earlobes? Absolutely. Is the eye a kind
of tongue? Absolutely, and here I go, licking.

The naturalist at work

After twenty-two years the word duende
in a letter.
The advantage to catching movies on TV
is there are some I've watched
seven times without seeing the start.
The experiment
was mixing Lagavulin and Tanqueray.
Freud is not given enough credit
as the writer of beautiful sentences.
A poet I admire is 99 today.
Hang a left.
The child born without eyes
sings Take Me Out to the Ball Game.
The caller's
ninety-seven year old mother was on the floor
three hours.
Hitler liked parakeets.
Some physicists refer to light
as information.
When he came home with bagels, his wife
was hanging from an extension cord
in the basement.
The best place
for a pack of Camels is the dash
of a Nova on a highway in Kansas.
I kissed you best
on top of the building with bats.
When I was a kid,
you could start a bulldozer
without a key.
There are statistics about navels.
She had a screwdriver through her hand
when she paid for the gas.
War is how we convince ourselves
we are peaceful at heart.
Hummingbirds are paintings
of not falling down.
Are violent pillboxes
with amphetamine hearts.

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Bob Hicok's fifth book, This Clumsy Living, will be published by Pitt in 2007. contents | next