Fire | Bob Hicok
Is your solitude crushing?
Do you feel like a milk carton
at the bottom of the ocean
with your face on it asking the abyss,
Have you seen this child?
The abyss shrugs and puts its back
into digging the hole
other holes look up to.
“Dunno” is the entire vocabulary
of the mysteries of life.
That’s something a giddy man says.
A limber man. A man
with nothing to snooze.
The funniest thing about life
remains that we’re all in this
alone together. I see your loneliness
and raise your jumping out a window
with trying to catch you,
the only sport that matters.
One day you’ll return my cordless drill
and the favor, and I’ll build
a new set of bookshelves
and try to live forever
in the time I have to live awhile.
Green Thumb | Bob Hicok
A rose,
anticipating failure,
died.
I buried it
where it stood.
When a rose rose
where the rose had failed
to believe in itself,
I thought my mother
might rise and be
my mother again,
so sat at her table
waiting for dinner.
Meatloaf. Her secret
was onions, a little cocaine.
Anticipating success,
I tucked a napkin
under my shirt
and put a rose
where she used to sit.
That rose soon quit
being beautiful
and I slowly quit
remembering where Orion
is in the sky.
I ate the wilted petals
in a house as empty
as a fist is
of light.
The hunter, the hunted:
where o where
o which am I?
About the Author:
Bob Hicok is the author of Water Look Away (Copper Canyon Press, 2023). He has received a Guggenheim and two NEA Fellowships, the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress, nine Pushcart Prizes, and was twice a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and nine volumes of the Best American Poetry.