Elegy Owed
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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.