Elegy Owed Read online

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  For Eve

  Contents

  Title Page

  Note to the Reader

  Pilgrimage

  Elegy with lies

  The days are getting longer

  O

  The story of 5:33

  Knockturn

  Good-bye, topspin

  Elegy to hunger

  Coming to life

  Ode to magic

  Pre-planning

  l ah g

  Sound scape

  You name this one

  A request

  One of those things we say

  Making do

  The gift

  Listen

  A country mapped with invisible ink

  Elegy to unnamed sources

  The missing

  Some recent weather

  Born again

  Scarecrow overhears himself thinking

  Elegy’s

  Desire

  Take care

  Obituary for the middle class

  Song of the recital

  Leave a message

  Blue prints

  What the great apes refer to as a philosophy of life

  The order of things

  How we came to live where we live

  The heart of the soul of the gist of the matter

  To speak somewhat figuratively for S.

  Absence makes the heart. That’s it: absence makes the heart.

  A very small bible

  Notes for a time capsule

  Another holiday has come and gone

  Ink

  Shed and dream

  You can never step into the same not going home again twice

  A poem that wanted to be a letter but didn’t know how

  Owe is to ode as whatever is to I don’t know

  Ode to ongoing

  Elegy to the time it takes to realize the futility of elegies

  Love

  Elegy ode

  Confessions of a nature lover

  Circles in the sky

  Something like an oath

  Elegy owed

  Missing

  As I was saying

  Speaking American

  Moving day

  Excerpts from mourning

  Life

  Sunny, infinite chance of rain

  In lieu of building a crib

  Equine aubade

  I tell myself the future

  Good-bye

  About the Author

  Books by Bob Hicok

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  Special Thanks

  Pilgrimage

  My heart is cold,

  it should wear a mitten. My heart

  is whatever temperature a heart is

  in a man who doesn’t believe in heaven.

  I found half

  an old Barbie in a field

  and bathed her torso

  in a coffee can of rain, put a deer skull

  with antlers in a window

  to watch with empty sockets

  deer go by, these are souls

  given the best care

  I can manage, a pigeon died

  and I gave it to the river.

  If lightning

  loved me, it would be sewn

  with tongues, it would open

  my mind to the sky

  within the sky.

  I put birds

  in most poems and rivers, put rivers

  in most birds and thinking, put the dead

  in many sentences

  blinking quietly, put missing

  into bed with having, put wolves

  in my mouth hunting whispers, put faith

  in making, each poem a breath

  nailed to nothing.

  Elegy with lies

  This lost person I loved. Loved for a hundred years.

  When I find her. Find her in a forest. In a cabin

  under smoke and clouds shaped like smoke. When I find her

  and call her name (nothing) and knock (nothing)

  and build a machine that believes it’s God and the machine

  calls her name (nothing) and knocks (nothing).

  When I tear the machine down and she runs from the cabin

  pointing a gun at my memories and telling me

  to leave, stranger, leave, man of hammers.

  When I can’t finish that story. When I get to the gun

  pointed at my head. When I want it to go off.

  When everything I say to anyone all day long

  is bang. That would be today. When I can’t use her name.

  All day long. Soft as cotton, tender as kiss. Bang.

  The days are getting longer

  The birds I feed seed every morning

  never thank me, I tell on them

  to my mother, who I assume

  raised them and everything

  from pups. She’s begun to forget

  why my voice shows up in her ear

  each week, let alone

  what the real name of the ruby-

  throated-whatsit is, it’s hard

  to help the dead be dead

  before they are. Mourning

  doves, cardinals, chickadees

  strip the cupboard bare

  in a matter of hours,

  as tiny guillotines cut each leaf

  from every tree, the leaves

  fall orange & brown, a muted rainbow

  arting-up the forgiveness

  of October air, which smells naked,

  new, and accepts the shape

  of everything in its mouth. She asked

  the other day how my day was,

  I told her, she asked again,

  as if I hadn’t answered

  or slept in the rumpus-room

  of her womb. Do you ever look

  at a crust of bread and wonder

  if that’s God, if the quiet

  that lives there is the same hush

  we become? I never do too,

  but is it, and why are we dragging

  these anvils behind us?

  O

  I’m thinking I watched a man and his son holding hands as they crossed a parking lot

  last night, thinking I was moved by the root or lifeboat or ladder of the father’s arm

  into the life of the son, the root or labyrinth of his arm as they moved at the pace

  of the child, whose walking still bore signs of the womb, of being wobbly water and I wanted

  to reverse my vasectomy on the spot and have a child with the moon, I wish there were a word

  that was
the thing it was the word of, that when I said sun I could be sun, all of it in my mouth,

  burning, you might think and be so marvelously right about praise that you open your door

  one day and the day walks in and stays for years

  The story of 5:33

  The sense of someone turning in what wasn’t exactly

  a dream or wakefulness. She would be leaving soon and I

  couldn’t sleep and wouldn’t get up. Like someone was there

  or to say, someone was there, puts them there, which is

  a place in the sense that any name derived from a place

  or region is a place, as in, these thoughts are their own

  pants or favorite drinks, if we are talking about people.

  She would be leaving soon for her mother’s for a week,

  someone turning on the other side of a door after saying

  something like, we should slap the shit out of morning

  so it leaves us alone in bed. It could be argued

  that any change from a steady state is violent, as now,

  I hear a cat in what had been an absence of cat,

  a breaking of a truce between the levels

  of crow-chatter and the background hissing of the universe,

  if we are talking about people. The sense of someone

  turning to look back in the most casual way

  someone might look back, not to ask the day to follow,

  or with anchored gaze, or to distend the shape of time,

  though as an object, I am full

  of these brushings of drums, these paintings

  hung on air until the walls arrive. Almost as if I am

  a voyeur of my thoughts, in the sense that boats don’t ask

  permission of water to float or drown, though water

  reflects these choices while going about its business.

  Had I time, and pins, and thread, I would poke myself

  all over and connect the sovereign drops of blood

  in a map for a lost child who realizes she had wanted

  since she was born to run away. The sense of someone turning

  toward the magnetism of wild flowers, if we are talking

  about people. Then I was here, looking back through an opening

  that is vined or bricked or flesh-hewn, the dress of it

  changing as someone turned toward their sense

  of someone turning, a wave the gesture that comes to mind

  now, if it’s not too late to rub the day and make a wish.

  Knockturn

  Tiptoeing through the grass

  not to wake the grass, sheet music

  for the laments all over the field

  like wings of moonlight, crickets

  hushing their banter around my ankles,

  then remembering they’re an ocean

  once I’ve passed, I enjoy thinking of solitude

  when I’m alone as the spouse of living

  with others, who are often sharp

  in my experience and pointy, people

  are like scissors, you shouldn’t run with them,

  I should go back and tell my wife

  my skin is a photograph, a slow exposure

  of stars she can touch

  with the swirls, the galaxies

  of her fingerprints when she wakes

  and gives me the dream report,

  decades she’s been late for a test

  or taken it naked, I would go

  to that school, I would major

  in Yes, the dark is my favorite suit to wear

  where bear are also

  sometimes, and coyote, and the dead

  get to be whatever they want as far

  as I can tell, the less I can see,

  the more personally I take the little

  I can make out with,

  holding what I am held by, the night

  and I almost the same smudge

  of whatever this is, it is seductive

  to wade into and slip away and not drown,

  my life the only thing that has been with me

  my whole life

  Good-bye, topspin

  Life has taken my cartilage and left me a biography of André Breton.

  I will limp persuasively and write you a letter sprinkled with French surrealism.

  This doesn’t feel like but is truly my good-bye to youth as I practiced it when I was young.

  What a lovely time you showed me, cartilage, heart, elbows, pineal gland.

  There was a party and I was invited.

  There was sprinting and wind looked at me like a brother.

  There was yee-hah and it was me injecting complacency with that hoedown.

  But nostalgia:

  go to hell.

  Not going to do that.

  Not going to be a lamprey on the side of the past, sucking for dear life, since I have had

  and am having a dear life.

  Thank you sweat glands, shin splints, kidney stones, proprioception for telling me where I am in space in relation to sunlight, breasts, saffron, life.

  Here.

  Here is where I am in space.

  Here is where space is in me.

  Elegy to hunger

  There’s a strain of cannibalism

  I admire. A beloved has died. A hole

  has been dug to be filled or a boat dragged

  across a mile of silence to burn

  upon the forgetfulness of water. One person

  or twenty stand at the hole or the boat

  & the body stares through closed eyes. The body

  turning gray, filling with clouds, with a rain

  that will last until flood. One person

  takes a bite and means it, not a nibble

  but a devotion, we are locusts

  after all. Then the others,

  until the body is clothed

  with unspeaking ghosts

  of mouths, the body an absence

  bearing absences. The bite. The soul.

  The swallow. Eating the hours

  she filled, the shadow she cast. And I.

  I should have.

  Coming to life

  He was made to touch a corpse as a child. His aunt’s. Mother’s side. When he was very young, he’d hear that phrase — she’s from your mother’s side — and imagine his aunt’s head growing from his mother’s ribs, tiny like Barbie’s. It was not exactly a vision, more of a thought he had, usually late at night. He wondered if his mother had done his aunt’s hair like his sister did Barbie’s, and asked her one morning, and she laughed, and soon he was older. His mother was crying in the front row. The tan folding chairs creaked when he sat down. A group of men, ties loose, stood near a back door, stepping out now and then for cigarettes. Smoke was alive in the sunlight, curling and twisting up like the woman he saw dance on TV a few nights before, her dress nearly one long scarf. When he put his head against his mother’s shoulder, she slid it around to her chest. He was almost too old for this, but no one said anything when he rested his hand on her breast. They sat quite awhile. People came and spoke of his aunt and Heaven and God. He closed his eyes and thought the light he saw inside might be Heaven. It formed a circle and faded, formed a circle and faded, as his mother hushed rosary beads through her hands. He opened his eyes. They stood. His mother kissed his aunt on each cheek and said something in her ear. Where do the words go in a dead person, he decided to ask his mother later, but never did. When she drew his hand toward his aunt’s face, he didn’t resist. He was like water being lead to water. Drink this, feel. She felt like nothing, he would tell a woman in college, their backs to the wall as they sat in bed. She’d asked what he meant by nothing. It was just that, as if in the silence of her skin, all possibilities had been taken away. But they had just made love and he didn’t want to bruise their warmth. The opposite of this, he said, putting a finger to the mole on her knee. The rest of the afternoon, it was as if someone had said to them,
Here are the brand-new bodies. Open them.

  Ode to magic

  Do the one where you bring the woman

  back from the dead, his host, the king, commanded,

  but the magician would not.

  He did the one in which he was one half

  of the folk-indie duo Heartwind.

  He did the one that required a volunteer tornado

  from the audience.

  He did the one in which the lungs of a warlord

  are filled with lava.

  But he would not bring the woman back from the dead.

  The king wanted to cut his head off

  but the queen said, Perhaps this is just a poem.

  This is just a poem.

  Everyone is alive as long as the poem is alive.

  The king wears a crown of a thousand crows.

  The queen keeps three lovers inside the castle

  of her dress, the third a spare for the second,

  the second a technical advisor to the first.

  The magician’s tongue is nothing but the word

  abracadabra and the dead woman has just written

  cotton candy on her shopping list, just written

  antelopes and reminded the poet

  he is running out of things to say.

  The queen asks him, Do the one in which your heart

  is folded over and pounded with moonlight,

  in which you claim to miss everything —

  I like how big your arms are in that one,

  your throat the size of the universe

  before silence gets the last word.