Bob Hicok

It was a misunderstanding. I got into bed, made love with the woman I found there, called her honey, mowed the lawn, had three children, painted the house twice, fixed the furnace, overcame an addiction to blue pills, read Spinoza every night without once meeting his God, buried one child, ate my share of Jell-o and meatloaf, went away for nine hours a day and came home hoarding my silence, built a ferris wheel in my mind, bolt by bolt, then it broke just as it spun me to the top. Turns out I live next door.

At forty-eight, to be given water, which is most of the world, given life in water, which is most of me, given ease, which is most of what I lack, here, where walls don’t part to my hands, is to be born as of three weeks ago. Taking nothing from you, mother, or you, sky, or you, mountain, that you wouldn’t take if offered by the sea, any sea, or river, any river, or the pool, beside which a woman sits who would save me if I needed saving, in a red suit, as if flame is the color of emergency, as I do, need saving, from solid things, most of all, their dissolve.

I heard from people after the shootings. People I knew well or barely or not at all. Largely the same message: how horrible it was, how little there was to say about how horrible it was. People wrote, called, mostly e-mailed because they know I teach at Virginia Tech, to say, there’s nothing to say. Eventually I answered these messages: there’s nothing to say back except of course there’s nothing to say, thank you for your willingness to say it. Because this was about nothing. A boy who felt that he was nothing, who erased and entered that erasure, and guns that are good for nothing, and talk of guns that is good for nothing, and spring that is good for flowers, and Jesus for some, and scotch for others, and “and” for me in this poem, “and” that is good for sewing the minutes together, which otherwise go about going away, bereft of us and us of them. Like a scarf left on a train and nothing like a scarf left on a train. As if the train, empty of everything but a scarf, still opens its doors at every stop, because this is what a train does, this is what a man does with his hand on a lever, because otherwise, why the lever, why the hand, and then it was over, and then it had just begun.

The dog licks my hand as I worry about the left nipple of the woman in the bathroom. She is drying her hair, the woman whose left nipple is sore. We looked this evening for diagonal cuts or discoloration or bite marks from small insects that may be in our bed. It is a good bed, a faithful bed. A bed that won’t be hurt by the consideration we gave to the possibility of small though disproportionately strong insects in our bed. The blow-dryer sounds like a jet taking off. The first time I flew to Brussels, people began the journey happy but ended with drool on their shirts. She is drying her hair though she has never been to Brussels. Drying her hair though she could be petting a dog. Drying her hair while having red thoughts about what the pain in her nipple means. I would not dry my hair in such a moment but I am bald. The body of the woman has many ways to cease being the body of the woman. I have one way to be happy and she is that way. I would like to fly with her to Brussels. We would not be put off by the drool. This is what happens when people sleep. We would buy postcards of the little boy who saved Brussels when he peed on a fire. We would be romantic in public places. For the moment these desires can best be furthered by petting a dog. I’m also working on this theory. That sometimes a part of the body just hurts. That the purpose of prayer is to make the part of the body that sometimes just hurts the little toe or appendix. Something vestigial or redundant. Something that can be jettisoned. I have no reason to use the word cancer while petting a dog. Here is a piece of a second during which a jet is not flying nor is it on the ground. I’m working on a theory that no one can die inside that piece of a second. If you are comforted by this thought you are welcome to keep it.

I'm in a plane that will not be flown into a building. It's a SAAB 340, seats 40, has two engines with propellers is why I think of beanies, those hats that would spin a young head into the clouds. The plane is red and loud inside like it must be loud in the heart, red like fire and fire engines and the woman two seats up and to the right resembles one of the widows I saw on TV after the Towers came down. It's her hair that I recognize, the fecundity of it and the color and its obedience to an ideal, the shape it was asked several hours ago to hold and has held, a kind of wave that begins at the forehead and repeats with slight variations all the way to the tips, as if she were water and a pebble had been continuously dropped into the mouth of her existence. We are eighteen thousand feet over America. People are typing at their laps, blowing across the fog of coffee, sleeping with their heads on the windows, on the pattern of green fields and brown fields, streams and gas stations and swimming pools, blue dots of aquamarine that suggest we've domesticated the mirage. We had to kill someone, I believe, when the metal bones burned and the top fell through the bottom and a cloud made of dust and memos and skin muscled across Manhattan. I remember feeling I could finally touch a rifle, that some murders are an illumination of ethics, that they act as a word, a motion the brain requires for which there is no syllable, no breath. The moment the planes had stopped, when we were afraid of the sky, there was a pause when we could have been perfectly American, could have spent infinity dollars and thrown a million bodies at finding the few, lasering our revenge into a kind of love, the blood-hunger kept exact and more convincing for its precision, an expression of our belief that proximity is never the measure of guilt. We've lived in the sky again for some years and today on my lap these pictures from Iraq, naked bodies stacked into a pyramid of ha-ha and the articles about broomsticks up the ass and the limbs of children turned into stubble, we are punch-drunk and getting even with the sand, with the map, with oil, with ourselves I think listening to the guys behind me. There's a problem in Alpena with an inventory control system, some switches are being counted twice, switches for what I don't know— switches of humor, of faith—but the men are musical in their jargon, both likely born in New Delhi and probably Americans now, which is what the flesh of this country has been, a grafted pulse, an inventory of the world, and just as the idea of embrace moves chemically into my blood, and I'm warmed as if I've just taken a drink, a voice announces we've begun our descent, and then I sense the falling.

Nobody I know is a god. A mother and son fall into the river's million hands, the river's smash and grab. They go under, climb the ropeless water up, wave, open their mouths and scream wet silences as they slide back under. A man jumps in to save them, leaves the edge as a needle into the river's muddy sinews, a woman jumps in to save his vanishing and the mother and son and is stripped by the flood, her pants drowning right beside her, another man jumps in to save them all and a woman jumps in after him to save them all plus one, cars arrive and people get out and leap into the river, the river's being filled with whatever's in their pockets and their hands and their eyes, with nickels and dollar bills and bibles and sunsets, the beautiful brush strokes of this beautifully dying day, people pile like a river inside the river, they keep coming and diving in, they keep feeding their breath to the water, which is less, which is thinned, until the mother and son rise on a mound of strangers and dead, the sun warming them, blessing their faces slowly dry.

We were young and it was an accomplishment to have a body. No one said this. No one said much beyond “throw me that sky” or “can the lake sleep over?” The lake could not. The lake was sent home and I ate too many beets, went around with beet-blood tongue worrying about my draft card-burning brother going to war. Other brothers became holes at first base at war, then a few holes Harleying back from war in their always it seemed green jackets with pockets galore and flaps for I wondered bullets, I wondered how to worship these giants. None of them wanted to talk to me or anyone it seemed but the river or certain un-helmeted curves at high speed, I had my body and flung it over branches and fences toward my coming sullenness as the gravity of girls’ hips began and my brother marched off to march against the war. I watched different masses of bodies on tv , people saying no to the jungle with grenades and people saying no to the grenades with signs and my father saying no to all of them with the grinding of his teeth he spoke with. I’d pedal after the nos up and down a hill like it was somehow a rosary, somehow my body was a prayer I could chant by letting it loose with others like me milling around the everything below five feet tall that was ours, the everything below the adult line of sight that was ours to hold as long as we could: a year, a summer. Until the quarterback came back without . . . well, without. When the next Adonis stepped up to throw the bomb.

He was hit back of the head for a haul of $15, a Diner’s Club Card and picture of his daughter in a helmet on a horse tethered to a pole that centered its revolving universe. Pacing the halls, he’d ask for a blow job he didn’t want. The ward’s new visitors didn’t know this request was all the injury had left him to say, and would be shamed or pissed, a few hitting him as he stood with his mouth slightly open and large frame leaning in. His wife divorced him for good and blameless reasons. He would not be coming home to share his thoughts on film and weather, or remembering her any longer than it took to leave a room. He liked ham. Kept newspapers in drawers and under his bed, each unread page hand-pressed flat. And when it snowed he leaned into one of the sealed, unbreakable windows, a cheek to the cool glass as he held his fingers over his mouth and moaned low and constant like the sound of a boat on the far side of a lake. When he died they cut him open to see how his habits had been rewired and so tightly looped. Having known him they were afraid of what can happen when you cross the lot to the office or pull up to a light and thump the wheel as you might any hour. If you stare at the dyed and beautiful cross sections of a brain, it’s natural to wonder how we extract the taste of coffee or sense of a note accurately found and held on an oboe from this bramble. On Duke’s slides they circled the regions of blight which explain why almost all behavior we recognize as human was lost, but not why a man who’d curl into a ball like a caterpillar when barely touched, could only ask for sex, for intimacy, for the very thing he could least accept and lived twelve years without, no embrace or caress, no kiss on the lips before sleep, until he died in the lounge looking out on winter sky that seemed eager to snow all day but didn’t.

He has five children, I’m papa to a hundred pencils. I bought the chair he sat in from a book of chairs, staplers and spikes that let me play Vlad the Impaler with invading memos. When I said I have to lay you off a parallel universe was born in his face, one where flesh is a loose shirt taken to the river and beaten against rocks. Just by opening my mouth I destroyed his faith he’s a man who can think honey-glazed ham and act out the thought with plastic or bills. We sat. I stared at my hands, he stared at the wall staring at my hands. I said other things about the excellent work he’d done and the cycles of business which are like the roller-coaster thoughts of an oscilloscope. All this time I saw the eyes of his wife which had always been brown like almonds but were now brown like the crust of bread. We walked to the door, I shook his hand, felt the bones pretending to be strong. On his way home there was a happy song because de Sade invented radio, the window was open, he saw delphinium but couldn’t remember the name. I can only guess. Maybe at each exit that could have led his body to Tempe, to Mars, he was tempted to forget his basketball team of sons, or that he ever liked helping his wife clean carrots, the silver sink turning orange. Running’s natural to most animals who aren’t part of a lecture series on Nature’s Dead Ends. When I told him, I saw he was looking for a place in his brain to hide his brain. I tried that later with beer, it worked until I stood at the toilet to make my little waterfall, and thought of him pushing back from a bar to go make the same noise.

I called a man today. After he said hello and I said hello came a pause during which it would have been confusing to say hello again so I said how are you doing and guess what, he said fine and wondered aloud how I was and it turns out I’m OK. He was on the couch watching cars painted with ads for Budweiser follow cars painted with ads for Tide around an oval that’s a metaphor for life because most of us run out of gas and settle for getting drunk in the stands and shouting at someone in a t-shirt we want kraut on our dog. I said he could have his job back and during the pause that followed his whiskers scrubbed the mouthpiece clean and his breath passed in and out in the tidal fashion popular with mammals until he broke through with the words how soon thank you ohmyGod which crossed his lips and drove through the wires on the backs of ions as one long word as one hard prayer of relief meant to be heard by the sky. When he began to cry I tried with the shape of my silence to say I understood but each confession of fear and poverty was more awkward than what you learn in the shower. After he hung up I went outside and sat with one hand in the bower of the other and thought if I turn my head to the left it changes the song of the oriole and if I give a job to one stomach other forks are naked and if tonight a steak sizzles in his kitchen do the seven other people staring at their phones hear?