Bob Hicok

My wife went into the pantry for peaches but came out with a baby — I hadn’t noticed the house was pregnant, she said — it was crying, so I cried back — then she cried, the woman I barely know after sixteen years — why just the other day, she told me she’d always been afraid #2 pencils might be made of what they’re named — but even crying it was cute — pink and scrunchy-eyed — like a newt balloon someone had blown up until puffy and ready to pop — it was as if the universe decided it was time to act our age — that’s when we threw all our heroin out — took the high-wire down and stopped skeet shooting in the living room — and as much as I miss yelling Pull while stoned and standing on the edge of the air, looking into the abyssal fall I sorta desperately want, someone’s gotta change the diapers and burp the thing when it fills with swamp-gas or whatever that is — the miracle, you know, of birth is that my wife and I gave up hang gliding for making the nummy sound against the belly of the beast who showed up and took over — just as once, I shot the rapids, popped out, squirmed against my mother and destroyed every other future she might have lived but one — long before I could speak, I was cruel — for a few seconds, I let my mother believe I was everything she ever wanted — and even now, decades after my few perfect seconds as a baby, if I called, at the first unexpected brush of Hey, ma against her ear, she’d still be hoodwinked by the tidal pull of my voice on the ghost of a womb they long ago ripped out, that she was holding a full moon in her arms

She does this thing. Our seventeen- year-old dog. Our mostly deaf dog. Our mostly dead dog, statistically speaking. When I crouch. When I put my mouth to her ear and shout her name. She walks away. Walks toward the nothing of speech. She even trots down the drive, ears up, as if my voice is coming home. It’s like watching a child believe in Christmas, right before you burn the tree down. Every time I do it, I think, this time she’ll turn to me. This time she’ll put voice to face. This time, I’ll be absolved of decay. Which is like being a child who believes in Christmas as the tree burns, as the drapes catch, as Santa lights a smoke with his blowtorch and asks, want one?

The telephone company calls and asks what the fuss is. Betty from the telephone company, who’s not concerned with the particulars of my life. For instance if I believe in the transubstantiation of Christ or am gladdened at 7:02 in the morning to repeat an eighth time why a man wearing a hula skirt of tools slung low on his hips must a fifth time track mud across my white kitchen tile to look down at a phone jack. Up to a work order. Down at a phone jack. Up to a work order. Over at me. Down at a phone jack. Up to a work order before announcing the problem I have is not the problem I have because the problem I have cannot occur in this universe though possibly in an alternate universe which is not the responsibility or in any way the product, child, or subsidiary of AT&T. With practice I’ve come to respect this moment. One man in jeans, t-shirt and socks looking across space at a man with probes and pliers of various inclinations, nothing being said for five or ten seconds, perhaps I’m still in pajamas and he has a cleft pallet or is so tall that gigantism comes to mind but I can’t remember what causes flesh to pile that high, five or ten seconds of taking in and being taken in by eyes and a brain, during which I don’t build a shot gun from what’s at hand, oatmeal and National Geographics, or a taser from hair caught in the drain and the million volts of frustration popping through my body. Even though. Even though his face is an abstract painting called Void. Even though I’m wondering if my pajama flap is open, placing me at a postural disadvantage.Breathe I say inside my head, which is where I store thoughts for the winter.All is an illusion

I sell one bristle brushes. People seeking two bristle brushes I send to the guy on Amsterdam, who’s in a rush. I may have one customer a year for my one bristle brushes, a one-eyed lover of tanagers, she may have one dollar to spend in the moment light’s neither day’s or night’s, but one’s where infinity begins. Whoever she is, she’s always painting barbules, I’m always thinking, no one will notice that they notice this, that her tanagers move, that everything’s alive. We talk care and feeding of the one bristle brush. Care exists. I thrive.

Historians will tell you my uncle wouldn't have called it World War II or the Great War plus One or Tombstone over My Head.

For Flaco A cooler head of lettuce prevailed, but when the actor asked his question and paused for us to watch him pause and think inside the pause, I almost answered as if we were in a bar, just the two of us and a balcony and spotlight. The two of us and programs and makeup and a sofa from the director’s living room and the black/ womb/agora/séance of theater inviting us to feel together alone. I recall I don’t recall the question but its scope on his face was immense, as if he were the Milky Way asking am I pretty, am I here for sure for real for long

You could drive out of this country and attack the world with your ambition, invent wonder plasmas, become an artist of the provocative gesture, the suggestive nod, you could leave wanting the world and return carrying it, a noisy bundle of steam and libido, a ball of fire balanced on your tongue, you might reclaim Main Street in a limo longer than a sermon, wave at our red faces while remembering that you were born a clod hopper, a farmer’s kid, and get over that hump once and for all by telling A Great Man’s stories— the dirty jokes of dictators, tidbits of presidential hygiene, insights into the psychotropic qualities of power and the American tradition of kissing moneyed ass. Your uncle would still call you Roy Boy, pheasants sun themselves beside the tracks, waiting for the dew to burn off before their first flight, and corn grow so high that if you stood in the field you’d disappear, the fact aiming your eyes down the road.

You can’t trust lesbians. You invite them to your party and they don’t come, they’re too busy tending vaginal flowers, hating football, walking their golden and chocolate labs. X gave me a poem in which she was in love with a woman and the church but the church couldn’t accept four breasts in one bed. When I asked if our coworkers knew, she dropped her head and I said nothing for years until this morning I realized no one reads poems: my secrets and hers are safe in verse. I knew she’d have enjoyed the Beaujolais and I want to meet Dianne, Mona Lisa, Betty, Alice, the name’s been changed to protect women who can’t stand in a room holding hands because you can’t trust heterosexuals to love love, however it comes. So I recorded the party for her, for them, the mic a bit away from the action to catch the feel of waves touching shore and letting go, the wash of moods across the hours of drink and yes, some grapes were thrown and I breathed the quickening revelation of a cigarette, someone said “I gave up underwear for Lent” and I hope they play the tape while making love. As if finally the world’s made happy by who they are, laughing with, not at the nipple lick clit kiss hug in bed and after, the on and on of meals and moons and bills and burning days of pretending they don’t exist. “Who’s she? Just a friend.” And oceans are merely dew upon the land.

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.

Our fathers have formed a poetry workshop. They sit in a circle of disappointment over our fastballs and wives. We thought they didn't read our stuff, whole anthologies of poems that begin, My father never, or those that end, and he was silent as a carp, or those with middles which, if you think of the right side as a sketch, look like a paunch of beer and worry, but secretly, with flashlights in the woods, they've read every word and noticed that our nine happy poems have balloons and sex and giraffes inside, but not one dad waving hello from the top of a hill at dusk. Theirs is the revenge school of poetry, with titles like "My Yellow Sheet Lad" and "Given Your Mother's Taste for Vodka, I'm Pretty Sure You're Not Mine." They're not trying to make the poems better so much as sharper or louder, more like a fishhook or electrocution, as a group they overcome their individual senilities, their complete distaste for language, how cloying it is, how like tears it can be, and remember every mention of their long hours at the office or how tired they were when they came home, when they were dragged through the door by their shadows. I don't know why it's so hard to write a simple and kind poem to my father, who worked, not like a dog, dogs sleep most of the day in a ball of wanting to chase something, but like a man, a man with seven kids and a house to feed, whose absence was his presence, his present, the Cheerios, the PF Flyers, who taught me things about trees, that they're the most intricate version of standing up, who built a grandfather clock with me so I would know that time is a constructed thing, a passing, ticking fancy. A bomb. A bomb that'll go off soon for him, for me, and I notice in our fathers' poems a reciprocal dwelling on absence, that they wonder why we disappeared as soon as we got our licenses, why we wanted the rocket cars, as if running away from them to kiss girls who looked like mirrors of our mothers wasn't fast enough, and it turns out they did start to say something, to form the words hey or stay, but we'd turned into a door full of sun, into the burning leave, and were gone before it came to them that it was all right to shout, that they should have knocked us down with a hand on our shoulders, that they too are mystified by the distance men need in their love.