This Clumsy Living

By Bob Hicok

Winner of the 2008 Bobbit National Poetry Prize.

Few others in contemporary poetry are so brilliantly able to combine wit and weight, to charge the language so it virtually glows in the dark. Hicoks poems just plain rock. They rock because they are gorgeous. They rock because they are sad and turn on the radio. They dance our clumsy living with our shadows and our isolations to a music that always, always remembers the original delight in which the feel of things, if [we] cherish, helps [us] live / more like a minute than a clock.--Beckian Fritz Goldberg

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Release date: Jan 21, 2006
• ISBN: 9780822990642

Book preview

Twenty-three windows

Twins

She has a dream and she has the same dream.

She says moon and she says moon and both put their she-phones

to their chests.

She says in my dream I slept between your mattress and box spring

and she nods and she hears her nod.

She says I was in the blue dress before you put it on

and after you put it on, like a soft paper flower she says

and she says yes, like a soft paper flower.

She nestles the phone in her crotch and she nestles the phone

in her crotch and the pubic hairs say it was warm in the dream.

She puts her face against the cool window and they play

where’s my face and she guesses against the cool window.

She says I hung up the phone an hour ago and she says

I hung up the phone last year and still we go on talking

she says and she says we go on talking even while I am dead

and even while I am coming back to life.

She is two places at once and she is two places at once

which is four places at once.

She has to go back to sleep now and she has to go back to sleep now.

She says are you asleep now and she says yes and are you asleep now

and she says yes and they go on talking about being asleep now.

She has a dream and she has the same dream and in the dream

she is dreaming what she dreams and she is dreaming what she dreams.

Then it rains.

Absolution

Clean sheets.

Hotels just have them, without your asking.

Usually, as if you were a flower,

you have to put desire into your mouth and your mouth

against the air to get what you want.

You have to talk.

And in talking there’s more noise to shatter you.

More than the squeal of the already-started car

being started, like we can double go.

More than an anchor breaking the sea.

In Chicago, I slipped into a bed above the million lights

showing stars how watched-over they’ve made us feel.

It was cool inside at first like the groove

of a streambed, then warm like cotton candy

at the Miami Zoo.

There was a sense across my skin, reported by the finger

of every hair, that I was starting over

at whatever I’d long ago begun.

I think I slept because there was a field in my room.

I ran down the field and my feet were tricycles.

The field tipped like a teeter-totter and I ran up

into a tree with a hundred arms pointing everywhere

at once.

When I stood naked at the window so Lake Michigan

would trust me, I missed the bed so much

I wrote a note on the hotel pad that I was coming back

soon, called down and a man came and presented the note

to the bed.

During this phase of enlightenment, I put on a white robe

that had glowed in the hermitage of the closet.

It had hollow sleeves to embrace my embrace, pockets

to soften my hands of fists, and a sash to tie me up

in comfort.

Have you ever, pulling back the covers, heard nothing

and for once, believed this elocution?

Then all night, your body whispering

through its turns, sheets listening, listening,

until the forgetting wash, when they confess

to the shrugging water your sins.

Grooming

I shave my hair closer to my thoughts.

There’s a scar on the left side of my head I forget

why I have.

I must have fallen as a kid down the stairs or in a dream

of glass.

It’s whiter than the uncut parts of me,

like I was blood brother

to the snow angels I flapped across the park

to help Sundays fly away.

As if my skin is eating peppermint, my head is tingly

as I walk to the mailbox.

It’s sunny in November, like weather’s part in being sad

is broken.

Stephen’s sent leaves from his backyard in Baltimore

I’ve never met.

They’re green and red and I show the cedar

with lichen what city trees look like.

Sarah is happy about her book

and the two horses on her card are black

and I will carry them secretly in my pocket

for freedom.

The flyer says

Amanda’s twelve and missing and to call

if I’ve seen her and I believe in God for three seconds

in case it helps.

There are all these spots to sit I finally notice

about the world.

People go by in cars either way and don’t see my head

being more naked than it was an hour ago.

I bet myself that the next thing that doesn’t happen

will be a man walking by in chains.

A man walking by in chains asks if this is the way

to the locksmith.

I think so I say

and he strides musically toward a man who is a student

of tumblers.

An ant finds my shoe in its path and adds it

to