Elegy Owed
Authors: Bob Hicok
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For Eve
- 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
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.
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 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?
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 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.
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
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.
