Two Poems
An exact record of what happened after I typed the word I
I set out to build a shed but ended up with a boat.
Went for a cheeseburger but came home with a tattoo
of Sidney Poitier listening to Édith Piaf. I meant
to be afraid of the dark and I am afraid of the dark
but only at night and only because I can’t see.
I thought I’d speak Spanish by now and have written
seven or eight really good songs that people love
even though I have no agent or label or roadies
and the songs aren’t even recorded, fans
just arrive and put their ears against my house
while I play to the chairs gathered around the table
as if waiting for it to say the most amazing thing.
I am waiting for me to say the most amazing thing
every day, to be changed by the shape a breath takes
and how it opens some drawer or sunken treasure
in my head and I see and live as clearly as a clarinet
reaching out from the far side of a lake at dusk
with the full measure of existence contained within
its one plaintive syllable. But getting back
to cheeseburgers, I’m hungry, and the table does say
it has my back by accepting all the shit I pile on it,
and a boat is a kind of shed and better than a shed
simultaneously, in that I can store stuff in it
and sail away if the wind will take me hostage.
I’m not saying all the accidents in your life
end up bringing roses to your doorstep from a stranger
who’ll adore you if you give them a chance, but I am also
not not saying that. If you’re thinking,
This guy wants to have his cake and eat it, too,
it’s time that we’re clear, there’s no other purpose for cake
than to be eaten. Cake as lover, mechanic, muralist, tree,
waterfall, skydive, lesson in elocution: have any of these
panned out? Maybe the first. Maybe I’ve stumbled
for sixty years, and fallen, and fallen out of one fall
into another, maybe there’s no landing, maybe it’s all tumbling
once you leave the pool of the womb until the tumbling ends
and we wait for the judges to score the routine. Maybe.
Definitely. One hundred percent that’s what I’m saying
right now is going on. Can you believe this poem
was supposed to be a shopping list, that I was meant
to be an engineer, not a poet, a newt, not a man,
that the Earth was trying really hard to mind
its own business when we showed up? I bet you can.
To be wanted is all we ask
Six days of rain and a seventh begun.
When I consider the likelihood that Noah
had a drinking problem by the end, after weeks of rain
and smelling cow shit and elephant shit
and all the other feces that came in twos,
I want to read that bible and make an orrery
with a tangerine at the center.
A friend is only happy when it’s cloudy, the sun
a buzz in his head, and these pewter skies
are heaven for him, but I need to see
and eat the sun, let the juice of it
run down my face and drip on the dirt
where the ants live, or life turns moldy
and pointless, even though I know life
is very pointy, very sharp and dangerous
but also lovely, even when it rains
in summer, when maple leaves
turn shiny and sexy and the horizon looms
like a wet kiss.
I’m torn, you see,
in my shoulder from swimming
and in my heart
between the wonders of existence
and wondering if existence
is worth a shit. It rains
or it doesn’t, I love a woman
who’ll die along with my love for her,
roses are red and violets
aren’t roses, and all the romance
and nihilism, the tall buildings
we imagine and the tall buildings we build,
even the thousand signatures of music
left on our brains through our days,
of violins and loons, of the sweet voices
that could coax wings from our backs
so that we might fly in their direction,
will disappear along with our eulogies,
those memories pinned to the air,
those names whispered
inside the tornado of grief.
Six days of rain and a seventh begun.
I had to cover the base of the Japanese maples
we’d just planted to keep them from drowning.
This is my ark.
It is made of the remains of boards
cut for other purposes
and lain across the earth
to shed water away
from two of her children.
May they live
nine hundred and fifty years.
May you have an umbrella
with blue sky on the inside
during the day and stars at night,
if you believe that the imagination
is god, as this poem does.
This poem is also my ark.
It is made of instinct
and consciousness, of groping
and hoping that a eulogy
for our eulogies
is not out of the question,
since no one is listening
to our songs but us.
When I am done, I will miss missing life
most of all, miss missing the sun,
miss missing Eve’s face
when she turns to follow a hummingbird
and returns changed by the experience,
in the mood to float, to hover,
miss missing the high green of summer
brought by rain, the riot of chlorophyll
and the possibility that evil
can be washed away by a flood.
Faith is my ark, in erasure
and what comes after,
the forgetting of birds each morning
that they sang the same songs
the day before, the new chance
a river always is to leave,
and the recycling of my body into fog,
grass, sand and eventually glass
a child looks through at rain
that makes her feel safe, her house housed
in the embrace of water
whispering ‘stay’ against the roof,
as if it’s the only word it knows,
the only word there is, before it goes
and takes this promise away.
Bob Hicok has received Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress, and nine Pushcart Prizes. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and nine volumes of the Best American Poetry.