#hicok

[kateywroteit]

Whither Thou Goest

Fish can have mad cow disease and I have a problem with that. Purity suffers and salmon can't moo can't paw grass with the furious strokes the essential bovine faith that there's something in the earth for everyone. All along I've wanted the good days to be the good days and not good from twelve to three not good like drilling your teeth is good when it stops but good like moonlight on my wife's hip with the sheets pulled back and her hair riotous and misconstrued. That's one thing and not another. That's the best use of a bed and two bodies working out the most inclusive form of redemption known in the universe this side of black holes, which is where I want to be considering that on the other side of black holes fish with mad cow disease are indistinguishable from Komodo dragons who play power forward in the NBA. I'm not ashamed to admit my prayers are no longer unconscious but loud and practiced to the skin of the mirror to the muse of the cereal box to the road as I drive everywhere trying to find the last 3/8" drill this city has because I don't believe in god but trust that pushing veneration through my body makes god exist if only for a second within the chambered nuances of breath. In my favorite prayer I apologize for not having shouted earlier and in public say from the back of the subway the top of a table in a Fort Worth bar that whither thou goest I will follow. This should be said every day and with no substitutions for the archaic whither which is the tender part of the broken wheel of the phrase. This should be repeated like the turbulence of blood repeats harmonically or at least until it's understood that even if the way things are becomes the way they are not I'll be there when mad cows attack when madder fish swim back through the streams when a black hole shows up at the door wearing a tie and promising to suck all dirt all evil all manner of woe from this life and smiling in a fashion that breaks your knees. Whither or when thou goest, how and why you flee, in what manner or mode you glide or thrash there's the mercy of the bond, there's the moment you wake or refuse to ever sleep again, there's still your face when the wind's so fat it curls in the field to lick its wounds, and my promise to be there, conspicuously mad in my devotion.

-Bob Hicok

[bryanastarr]

"Eros scrabbles to rose and rage to gear or gare, as in Gare du Nord, where I trained in to Paris from not smoking pot in Master Mad, I’m sorry, Amsterdam, with its canals called grachts and clocks that bonged my homesick hours at different times. Which is smite for you violet types, a flower that says “love it” if you listen. Me, I do and don’t feel it matters that evil thrives in live, that we tinker and smash everything down to bits and then try to patch a path back home, it’s our lotto in life, to have no clue what a natural disaster is when that disaster is us. That’s what I love about the shrug, it says zilch sans le mouth and becomes more aerobic the more you admit the less you know, you know? It’s a jumble out there, kids, with slips and slides and elide’s eally ool, depending what’s lopped off, as in light of   hand or slight of and, but I better spot before you pots how sparse this parsing is. Besides, what can I say about language other than it’s an anal egg in need of one glorious u. Words or sword — pick your poisson. Every time I try to peak into speaking, the bag of gab to learn what our noodles are really up to, I get flummoxed that the tools I use are the stool I stand on to see a way in or out. I can’t even tell if  I’m more trapped or rapt, if meaning’s mean or play’s a dumb waiter riding numbly up and down. But have you noticed read becomes dear if you ignore the world as you find it and find it in you to swirl the word, in the way solve and loves are the same bones, different skeletons." -Bob Hicok, The pregnancy of words

[proformalove]

My life with a gardener

The screen door firecrackers closed.  I find her at the sundry drawer  prowling for twine. I’m nothing  she sees. There’s a tornado  in her hair, her face is streaked  with dirt like markings applied  before the rituals of drums. I’ve watched her shadow break free  and tend the next row of corn.  I understand this eagerness  as fully as I can speak for the ocean.  I say water is behind everything,  a blue dictator, say waves  are obsessed with their one word  but have no idea what that word is.  Her hands enter soil like needles  making the promise of a dress  from cloth. In December she begins  smelling lilacs, by February  she sees the holes  peppers burn through snow. I see her,  she’s the last green thing I need.  When finally she’s pushed inside  by the rude hands of dusk,  I set down my life for her skin,  taught all day how to smell  like the sun, and the hundred  directions of her hair, and eyes  that look through me to flowers  that only open their mouths  to speak with the moon.

Bob Hicok

Alwaysspeaking with the moon bryanastarr

[literarynotebook-blog]

Making it in Poetry, by Bob Hicok

The young teller at the credit union asked why so many small checks from universities? Because I write poems I said. Why haven’t I heard of you? Because I write poems I said.

[hardcoverpaperback]

When I don’t touch you it’s a mistake in any life, in each place and forever.

"Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem"—Bob Hicok

[thevulgar]

EPITHALAMIUM | Bob Hicok

A bee in the field. The house on the mountain 
reveals itself to have been there through summer. 
It’s not a bee but a horse eating frosted grass 
in the yawn light. Secrets, the anguish of smoke 
above the chimney as it shreds what it’s learned 
of fire. The horse has moved, it’s not a horse 
but a woman doing the stations of the cross 
with a dead baby in her arms. The anguish of the house 
as it reveals smoke to the mountain. A woman 
eating cold grass in Your name, shredding herself 
like fire. The woman has stopped, it’s not a woman 
but smoke on its knees keeping secrets in what it reveals. 
The everything has moved, it’s not everything 
but a shredding of the anguish of names. The marriage 
of light: particle to wave. Do you take? I do.

[thevulgar]

OTHER LIVES AND DIMENSIONS AND FINALLY A LOVE POEM | Bob Hicok

My left hand will live longer than my right. The rivers
of my palms tell me so.
Never argue with rivers. Never expect your lives to finish
at the same time. I think praying, I think clapping is how hands mourn. I think
staying up and waiting
for paintings to sigh is science. In another dimension this
is exactly what’s happening, it’s what they write grants about: the chromodynamics
of mournful Whistlers,
the audible sorrow and beta decay of Old Battersea Bridge.
I like the idea of different theres and elsewheres, an Idaho known for bluegrass,
a Bronx where people talk
like violets smell. Perhaps I am somewhere patient, somehow
kind, perhaps in the nook of a cousin universe I’ve never defiled or betrayed
anyone. Here I have
two hands and they are vanishing, the hollow of your back
to rest my cheek against, your voice and little else but my assiduous fear to cherish.
My hands are webbed
like the wind-torn work of a spider, like they squeezed
something in the womb but couldn’t hang on. One of those other worlds
or a life I felt
passing through mine, or the ocean inside my mother’s belly
she had to scream out. Here, when I say I never want to be without you,
somewhere else I am saying
I never want to be without you again. And when I touch you
in each of the places we meet, in all of the lives we are, it’s with hands that are dying
and resurrected.
When I don’t touch you it’s a mistake in any life,
in each place and forever.

[thevulgar]

ELEGY OWED | Bob Hicok

In other languages
you are beautiful - mort, muerto - I wish
I spoke moon, I wish the bottom of the ocean
were sitting in that chair playing cards
and noticing how famous you are
on my cell phone - picture of your eyes
guarding your nose and the fire 
you set by walking, picture of dawn
getting up early to enthrall your skin - what I hate
about stars is they’re not those candles
that make a joke of cake, that you blow on
and they die and come back, and you,
you’re not those candles either, how often I realize
I’m not breathing, to be like you
or just afraid to move at all, a lung
or finger, is it time already
for inventory, a mountain, I have three
of those, a bag of hair, box of ashes, if you
were a cigarette I’d be cancer, if you 
were a leaf, you were a leaf, every leaf, as far
as this tree can say.