Search Results for: Bob Hicok

March 2, 2024

“Show and Tell” by Bob HicokPosted by

Bob Hicok

SHOW AND TELL

Sky the color of warning. Well not red but pink,
now salmon, it innovates faster than I have words
to shape into clouds on their way to their new life
in the midst of their old. There’s no stopping,
no point at which a cloud kicks back
and smokes a cigarette, they’re all process.
Between typing “process” and looking at the plastic
dinosaur head sitting on my “Impressionist Masterpieces
Art Cube,” the pink disappeared where it had floated
like the idea of a tutu over Paris mountain
and I became bored with myself. So things change:
how exciting. Go tell the river, tell the cow
in the river. How about this: “Red sky at morning, sailors
wear condoms.” That’s more interesting.
I’ve never understood the claim by men that condoms
take the pleasure out of sex, it’s not
like you’re wearing a length of pipe.
When condoms were still the intestines of goats,
a man set stones into the ground outside his house
in Ravenna, where I’d walk with you in the tomorrow
I hope is coming this summer or next. We don’t have to talk
about condoms or clouds at all, we can talk about the deer
eating their way across draught, no rain in weeks,
no way I’m getting out of this alive, or none of that,
just the ocean, that bit of interpretative dance
on the horizon. Maybe the goal was to stand still
and whisper across 144 miles that the battle had begun
by waving flags, one signaler to another. That’s fine
for you and your Napoleonic wars, but what if wind
is who you want to go to bed with and you’re alright
with the fact that she won’t be there
even as you touch her? This ascription of gender
implies I know something
about secondary sexual characteristics
that you don’t, but I’m no doctor of change,
just a fan, same as any kid in the bleachers
cheering for the boredom of the third inning
to be interrupted by a reading of Proust. Madeleines.
How yum. This sky has cleared, by the way, of anything
but blue, and I suppose now I could pin
certain notions of clarity to the hour and feel
that I’ve honored what seems to be time
or the inclination to put language to work
putting up mirrors around the house. Even the feeling
I had at the start of this sentence has left town
already, and as another forms, part of me’s
still waving at the last as the balloon slips away.
If I could talk to fire, talk to wood
right before it burns, in the second flames
tumble across the grain, in the instant
before that second, when wood’s still wood
but the match is lit, I’d have, finally, a vocabulary
for being human, alive. This explains my pyromania
but nothing else.

—from Rattle #29, Summer 2008

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Bob Hicok: “I think of myself as a failed writer. There are periods of time when I’ll be happy with a given poem or a group of poems, but I, for the most part, detest my poems. I like writing. I love writing, and I believe in myself while I am writing; I feel limitless while I’m writing.”

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November 5, 2023

“This Again” by Bob HicokPosted by

Bob Hicok

THIS AGAIN

The recommendation from some website quoted on the news
is to rape, cut the throats of, and throw female Jews
off a cliff. But how far are the cliffs of Ithaca
from Cornell, where the raping and throat slashing
is supposed to occur? And if you don’t have a car,
are you supposed to borrow one or can you Uber a body
to a cliff and ask the driver to wait while you chuck it off?
And what if you’re afraid of heights? It’s time we address
the shocking lack of detail in antisemitism. It’s one thing
to hate Jews but another to ask me to hate Jews
without telling me how to hate Jews or why I should hate anyone
when loving everyone is an option. A difficult one, I admit,
impossible even, but in a process sense, it requires no knives
or cars or evil and can be conveyed in a simple phrase:
See someone, love someone. Or, Love thy neighbor
as thou loves apple pie. Or, love thy stranger
as thou loves starlight for touching us
without knowing our names. Have you ever felt
as brittle as kindling shattering to pieces
just under the shower curtain of your skin?
It’s a rhetorical question because I know you have
and will, as I have and do right now.
So screw every cult of hate. Every bullet and knife
and bomb and shitty thing said under the breath
or with the full conviction of the lungs. If you see a Jew,
be a Jew. If you see a Muslim, be a Muslim. If you see a human,
be a human. The lend-an-ear or a hand kind.
The “how’s it going” kind. The kind kind. No one chooses who
or where or when to be. We just sort of collectively are.
So hating you for being you makes no more sense
than you hating me for being me. And I don’t want to be raped
or have my throat slashed or get thrown off a cliff,
hard as that is to believe. I want to see the cliffs of Ithaca
in moonlight. The Kaaba in Mecca circled by a crowd
pulsing with faith. The Ice Hotel in a snow storm.
I want a really good pizza with an egg on it.
To kiss my wife on top of the Eiffel Tower.
All the parts of her that are Jewish
and all the parts that are human
and all the parts that make her sigh and moan.
Being human means understanding that being human
is the hardest thing you’ll ever do.
That we’re all partisans in this struggle,
fellow teamsters in not knowing
what the hell is going on, brothers and sisters
stuffing our befuddlement every morning
into pants and dresses we hope
don’t make us look fat and stupid and lost.
Everyone I know feels lost. The trick is
to feel lost together. Maybe you have a map
and I have a canteen. Certainly someone
has a pogo stick or cyclotron. We need food
and light and harmonicas and theremins
and stories about monsters
who decide not to eat the child
or stomp the village or fly over the night
with death on their wings. Lost together,
our nowhere becomes our somewhere. Lost together,
the dream of home never dies.
 

—from Poets Respond
November 5, 2023

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Bob Hicok: “Don’t know what to say about this, other than what the poem does.”

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August 7, 2022

“On Sticking Out like a Sore Opposable Thumb” by Bob HicokPosted by

Bob Hicok

ON STICKING OUT LIKE A SORE OPPOSABLE THUMB

We give hummingbirds sugar water
in defiance of dentists’ recommendations
everywhere, and in return
for our sweetness, have been gifted a nest
of thistle and dandelion down
attached with spider silk
to a plant on the front porch
that holds a peeping chick
I’m afraid to look at
lest my giant face and eyes
scare the tiniest heart for miles.
 
You probably know by now
of the extinction of birds
and the growing similarity
of those that remain, who are becoming
more and more crow-
and sparrow-like, snowy egrets
soon gone, griffon vultures, says thems
that study such things. Forgive me
 
for making the plural pluraler,
I just want more of everything
in this time of lessening
and to keep us from erasing
the world’s green and red plumage,
its blue and wild defiance of gravity.
And forgive us, for we are big-brained
 
and small-wisdomed, mostly inadvertently deadly
and largely incapable
of understanding the complexity of life,
yet we have bulldozers, earth movers,
power plants, car and swizzle stick factories,
can dam or redirect rivers, cut off
the tops of mountains and drill miles
below the sea, can even make matter
explode, smash the stuff of all stuff
to bits, making us gods
in diapers, magicians who have no clue
what we’ve pulled out of the hat,
and we need help. In addition to their zip
 
and chittering, their air wars
at the feeder over the four fake flowers
to sip from, what I love about the hummingbirds
is also what I fear about nature,
the constant demonstration
of human inability
to find a modest niche
and nestle among the other breaths. Are we
 
an amazing blaze, an evolutionary
oops-a-daisy so devoted to the pursuit
of comfort and ease
that for the sake of hummingbirds
and stoats, bats and bears, waterfalls
and evergreens and everglades
we have to go, or can we change,
can we share, I ask you now,
since my Magic 8 Ball shrugged
at the question, and the river
mumbled something about being late,
and I’m lost somewhere between
the reasonableness of indoor plumbing
and air-conditioning and the insanity
of buying toilet paper on-line. Another way
 
to put this: how many lives
and species are single-serving puddings
worth? I know: yum. But is yum
enough?
 

—from Poets Respond
August 7, 2022

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Bob Hicok: “This poem was written in response to this article: ‘As More Bird Species Go Extinct Those That Are Left May Be More Alike.’”

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April 4, 2021

“A Braid of Unknowing I Tie Before You” by Bob HicokPosted by

Bob Hicok

A BRAID OF UNKNOWING I TIE BEFORE YOU

Eight minutes, almost nine. I’ve been seeing a star
to the east in the morning. It’ll be hard
not to give four or five students Ds this semester.
Are optimists fools? For eight minutes, almost nine,
one man knelt on another man’s neck. A star or planet,
I don’t know. Many have stopped turning in poems
or coming to class, more than ever in my twenty years
of teaching, during this third semester of COVID.
Obviously there are more problems than solutions,
more shit than Shinola. A white cop kneeling
on a black man’s neck. I’ve been meaning to ask the internet
what the light is so I can refer to it in the first person,
Dear Vega, Dear Saturn, when I’m grateful for company
from so far away. They expected to be going to parties
and football games, to be drinking and dropping acid,
to be rubbing against space and time, but the friction
of bodies and growing older, into adults,
has been replaced by fear of breathing
in the wrong place at the wrong time.
To think we can change or get better at changing
our oil or not clear-cutting forests or listening
to opinions we don’t hold or sharing our wealth
is insane in an evidence-based system of analysis,
if you look at the data, if I remember back
to five minutes ago when I scanned the headlines
and Chicken Little was right: the sky is falling.
How is it not murder, clearly and simply murder
to kneel on a man’s neck for eight minutes, almost nine,
and what happens, what rot overtakes our hearts
when we can’t admit this, can’t white admit to black,
old to young, sane to the crazy world in which one man
tries to justify kneeling on another man’s neck
after subdued, after compliant, after hearing him
call for mama and say sixteen times that he can’t breathe,
that this is wrong, so obviously and clearly immoral
that we’ll step from this cruelty in unison
and cast it in steel and touch it every day
for the rest of our lives to remind ourselves
of what we’ll never do again. Dear Vega, Dear Saturn,
tell me something I don’t know about the universe,
that as it grows we grow, that as light leaves us
more arrives, that entropy is actually patience
in disguise, that love is the only way to explain
why atoms cling to each other and something more than the zero
exists. Is it kind to set aside their failures,
what they haven’t done or said, the stones they’ve channeled
with their silences in class, and how do we ask something
of each other, or give, in ways that lift and teach,
how can we lay this period of time on a blanket
and wrap it, roll it in softness and concern
and make our way to the other side? Optimism
is the source of karaoke, light bulbs, mosh pits, kissing
and fucking and birth and thinking a man’s pointless death
can have a point, can be a fulcrum or lever or both.
How do you a lift a world already afloat in space
or convince people that we’re surfers and gliders
called to be animals of grace, that we cling to speed
and grand motions and need each other to hang on?
I am lost in every way except my certainty
that the only true mirror is each and every other face.
Eight minutes, almost nine. It’ll be hard not to sit
in an actual room with their actual eagerness
to overcome gravity and time. Optimists are oceans
and skies at heart. A star or planet touching me with light
I want to deserve.

—from Poets Respond
April 4, 2021

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Bob Hicok: “Everything.”

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July 18, 2023

“As Crickets Chip Away the Light” by Michael KrieselPosted by

Michael Kriesel

AS CRICKETS CHIP AWAY THE LIGHT

I quit the news, turning my back on the world
except for the weather robot on the radio:

chrome manikin sitting all day, all night
at a gray metal desk in a white broadcast booth

reading the page of our future over and over
into an old microphone big as a silver cucumber.

His monotone of highs and lows soothes me.
He’s always there doing his job, not beating his

platinum wife or confessing some sordid affair
with an orange Cuisinart to the priest

who listened to our hearts for fifty years.
People don’t want to grow up he confessed,

when asked what he learned in that dim cubicle.
I lotus too long on the floor and my foot falls asleep.

A frost advisory follows me into the kitchen.
I hop on one leg. This could have been heaven,

except for humans over-farming Eden’s fertile plains.
There’s always some Solomon cutting down Lebanon’s cedars,

building a house for a God who moves on.
It’s getting dark. I snag a beer and stumble out.

Crickets chip away the light, drowning out
the droning voice in the house behind me.

Squatting on the steps, I watch a line
of fireflies stream the interstate,

remembering a firefight a friend confessed,
a navy buddy. We were drinking Mad Dog 20/20

when he told me how the tracers in
the river’s mirror were an eerie beauty.

I press the sweaty can against my neck
and stare at a cattail’s frozen explosion.

We’re more than just a tribe of monkeys
writing angry haiku. It matters, what we do.

—from Rattle #34, Winter 2010

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Michael Kriesel: “‘Crickets’ was a breakthrough, juggling multiple symbols toward the same meaning (something I admire in Bob Hicok’s work). Increasingly my mind hands me an anecdote, idea or image right when I need it. Some of the items in ‘Crickets’ go back twenty years (the navy conversation). Others showed up during writing, all of them true … even the hope at the end.”

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January 19, 2022

“Circles” by Karan KapoorPosted by

Karan Kapoor

CIRCLES

after Bob Hicok

I do not want my mother to die. My mother does not want her mother to die. Her mother does not want her husband to die. Her husband does not want his son to die. His son does not want his daughter to die. His daughter is too young to pronounce death, let alone decipher it. Three days later, when her grandfather will die, she’ll be braiding her doll’s hair. Thirty-six years later, when her father will die, she’ll be looking, with ocean eyes, at her six-year-old daughter braiding the hair of her doll. Three days later, tired of the doll, her daughter will ask her the question she did not ask her mother: where do they go? She won’t know what words to put in her mouth, so she’ll leave her mouth open. She’ll chew on it all night. Nobody wants to go somewhere they can’t return from, do they? But then, who wants to go so far only to return? My father cuts the strings of kites when they’re way up in the sky. The world is full of kites like these.

—from Poets Respond
January 19, 2022

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Karan Kapoor: “Bob Hicok’s birthday is today. I write poems because I want to make someone feel the same way Bob’s poems make me feel—full of wonder, beauty, joy and innocence. Each of his poems take me to a place beyond suffering. I imagine it’d be easier for Sisyphus to roll his boulder up and down the hill if there was Tchaikovsky in the background, or I was reading him Bob’s poems. I do not like that we write tribute poems to poets only once they’re dead. Bob Hicok is alive and writing the most surprising poems and deserves to be celebrated every day, but especially today. I’m so glad that he was born. His poems make me want to be a better person.” (web)

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August 30, 2020

“To Serve and Protect” by Bob HicokPosted by

Bob Hicok

TO SERVE AND PROTECT

You end up in a particular body, you who are you
and not me, and me who am I and not you, and she, and he,
and all the theys we meet along the way. Look at her
rocking her mumbly lips back and forth like a seesaw.
That guy’s forehead is so tall it could dunk on his hair.
She’s got hips that know what time it is in Paris.
We’re insides wed to outsides without choice, shotgun
marriages all, we fall into our breaths and spend our lives
shadow-boxing our natures with our nurtures or vice versa.
I guess. I suppose. I propose nothing new: do unto others
as you’d have them do unto your mother, the sun.
Would I shoot the sun in the back seven times for the crime
of walking away, would I kneel on its neck
until it were dead, would I shoot the sun in the head?
Who are you? Are you safe? Has anyone shot at you
since breakfast? Are your shoes on backward so you’re ready
at all times to arrive to your departures and say goodbye
to your hellos? On their way to a black man’s back this week,
seven cop bullets cast their shadows on me. I ended up white
in a country and time when that’s a shield and sword combined.
If you see something, be something, if you say something,
scream something, if you scream something, scream it again,
write it down, tie it to your pillow, mail it to your congresswoman,
build a house out of noise, a cathedral of no more. There
but for the grace of fucking go we all. The soul isn’t what’s in you
but how what’s in you makes its way out: the soul is a door.
Is mine opened or closed? I sit here wondering how some of us
get it in our heads and fists and guns that we own the world
when we’re guests at best, at worst, a smattering of atoms
deluded that we matter beyond the circles of hate or love
we walk. Hello. How are you? Are you surprised every time
a mirror has the temerity to look back and ask, Are you the best
we can do? I could have been an ant, a tree, a bomb, a cloud,
a poem or a lyre buried in a field for the earth to strum.
I guess. I suppose. I have imposed on you long enough.
I wish you a vast and happy life, a sky to call your own,
that your body isn’t held against you and that you’re free
to walk a city or valley under the power of your turmoils
and joys. As I’ve tripped and stumbled, grumbled
and glided forward, I’ve not had to look over my shoulder
to see if I’m being followed by a gun or noose,
which is neither too much to ask, or to give.

—from Poets Respond
August 30, 2020

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Bob Hicok: “’It’s amazing why we keep loving this country, and this country does not love us back.’ I can’t recall a statement that connected the personal and social as simply and movingly as what Doc Rivers said this week. What he said and how he said it—that he chose to remove his mask before he did – has lived with me and culminated as this poem.” (web)

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