Getting In Line
A New Poem
By Bob Hicok
A man crosses a field. He’d like something
to set down so he picks up a rock
about the size of a baby. Rock-baby
is heavier than a baby-baby would be,
the man has walked but a few steps
when he abandons the child. Years later,
there’s a knock on his door in the field:
rock-baby has grown up and wants
to get even. The man
doesn’t remember rock-baby,
Neko Case – Vengeance is Sleeping (buy)
so when rock-baby says, you never loved me,
the man says, sure, I can buy that,
and offers grown-up rock-baby a beer.
When they’re a little drunk, the man says,
your quarrel isn’t with me, your quarrel’s
with the poet who put us in the field,
and the poet’s quarrel
is with the God who makes poets
send people walking across fields,
and God’s quarrel is with the nothing
Neko Case – I’m an Animal
that came before God
that God is always trying to fill, even after God
has filled it. Grown-up rock-baby
thinks the man is telling him
he doesn’t really exist, he stones the man
to death to prove that his nonexistence
is not the case. Alone
with the bloody certainty
of his tangibility, he writes out,
again and again, my thoughts
have a city in them. And in that city,
Neko Case – Middle Cyclone
at night, a little girl
wants a goldfish for the goldfish
she already has, and the goldfish
wants a little girl for the little girl
he already has, and the bowl
wants a bowl beside it
to share the orange and rippling feeling
it would call soul if the word
wasn’t already taken.
Neko Case – Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth
Call Me a Lyre, I Dare You
A New Poem
By Bob Hicok
Last or some night
light, who cares the when of this,
Andrew Bird – Masterswarm (buy)
glittered the tree up at the end
of the wash from a car as moved the planet, I’m not
in touch with personally Saturn, in branched fingers
of eerily, I’d say off-the-shelf language, isn’t it
necessary still how life lit into the moment
to say other than the facts of it, see,
whatever the bits are inside that oscillate
or pinwheel, I was moved to internal whirrings
Andrew Bird – Privateers
cicadish, even though my epiphanic dog-walkings
mean shit to you in the throes of your
epiphanic askings of the moon, for what, after all
are we in this, some random sense of, fuck
if I know, belonging
Andrew Bird – Anonanimal
Poetry by Bob Hicok.
Discovered in this.
posted by Charlotte.
