Bob Hicok
Four Poems
Maybe I shouldn't write the cheers,
just iron the uniforms instead
I took a cricket hostage in my hands.
This broke its guitar
until I let it go. The easiest job:
being a roadie for crickets. Mostly
you sit around and smoke bottle rockets
and shoot off meth. I've never seen the world
looking bored. Grass itching
to join a motorcycle gang. An ocean convinced
everything would be better
if it took up yoga. Redwoods are wild:
three thousand years old and still sure
they can dunk on the sun. Is the sky cheating
when it palms every star? I don't ref
this shit, just hope to play. Thunder's
a kid who can't help shouting
about lighting, Did you see that? I did.
The air torn, flashing a peek
at the sky behind the sky, the one
that's all spark and tremor. Worms never worry
they're a dick. That's why I'm a student
of nature. Look at me taking notes, staying up
just to fail the test. I'll get there.
Not really. I'll get there. Fat chance.
I'll get there. Have it your way.
See why I relate most to fog? It sees clearly
it doesn't see at all. Brother, I say,
loud as a foghorn, hoping to save it
and me from the rocks, it's a process,
same as rust.
An undervalued part of the skill set
Decades ago, by heating a knife on a stove
and bringing it repeatedly to my forearm,
I burned the resemblance of a cactus
into my skin, on the off-chance
a voice would slip in under the pain
and tell me I was growing feathers
as I screamed, or I'd see a woman
with an exposed and beating heart
standing in front of me, but it fucking hurt
is all. Though slowly, as I healed,
I admired my flesh for attacking itself
in order to be rescued
from solitude, and tried again
with the same knife, this time cutting
just above an ankle until I bled,
and taking salt to the wound, under the theory
that I hadn't demanded enough of my body
to know if spirit is anything more
than the desire for something more.
Once again, pain was its own room,
an appetite without gift, and I never asked
the question that way again—Am I
a mirage?—though if you see me
walking down the street
with a tree, the two of us
gabbing away, or with my head
in the mouth of a river, or taking an axe
to a book to get below the words,
that's me wondering if I'm a wisp,
in a world that keeps saying, if I
may paraphrase, Duh.
Emotigraph
When I was a kid there was this tree I liked.
On its birthday I'd mark how tall it was
against the sky, just as my parents
asked a door jamb to memorize my progress
toward an unsettled mind. Yesterday
I read how mountains are made
to some deer. When I feel messy
either I take a broom to my head
or do this kind of outreach.
They're used to my voice
and I'm used to sitting alone
with ruminants. They chew
and look up for danger
and chew. All this slaughter
of grass and no one minds. In theory
their outer peace can become my inner peace
and I was a monarch in another life.
I flit and flew all the way to Mexico
and died. Do you know the word orogeny?
"The process of mountain formation
or upheaval." The deer didn't either.
One day I read to them
and the next test their vocabulary
to make sure they ignore me.
The tree got too big for me
but not the sky. They still live together
as far as I know. I want too much
and know I want too much
but am unable to put away desire.
If I sound defeated, I apologize:
I was going for broken.
You sit on a roof
because that's where stars look for you first
So much of what matters to me doesn't have genitals.
The person who matters most has a beautiful version
of the inny kind, but the sky that I love
doesn't need to procreate.
And that everything in the universe taken together
is closer to a vagina than a dick is a thing
I was thinking when the friend next to me,
the woman I was thinking it aloud to, fell off the roof
I was thinking it aloud on.
Stood up to stretch and woozed and kerplunked.
Good news: it's a low roof and grass is kind
and she stood up on the ground feeling fine
on account of the beers I guess or being Gumby
in her soul I suppose.
So I asked, Are you Gumby in your soul
when she climbed the ladder again and sat down
and hit her head with her fist to show how tough
she's had to be to make it this far, and said
she is Eleanor Roosevelt in her soul.
I'll spare you the ins-and-outs of taking her to emergency
despite the diagnosis of her fist and the details
of a doctor after two hours saying all the parts
and connections and auras check out, that she should go
and acquire debt and love and try to be "a spirit
not a ghost," to quote a poet, and driving her home
and giving her back to her wife to keep awake
in case her noggin was keeping a concussion secret,
all of which is dull anyway in comparison
to her asking through the window of the car,
If the universe is a vagina, where do I lick it,
and me thinking Anywhere you want
while pointing to the woman on the front porch
in a warm wash of light from a light bulb
about the size of a human heart.
Bib Hicok’s ninth book, Hold, is just out from Copper Canyon.