Odyssey (by Bob Hicok)

Odyssey


I sat in different places with different winds:
at the top of the drive where the blue weeds grow;
on the bench with hammering, the sound of a house
I couldn't see being built in the woods, child
of a green womb. Rain was coming, clouds a scarf
thrown across the sun. There might not be a spot
that wants me, I could wander my yard
and never fit this grass, the fence of rusted holes.
Beside the tongue of a shovel left out over night,
I laid my head, my fingers four more dreams
a daddy-longlegs touched in a blind world,
there's that longer leg that's not a leg,
it's a telegram sent out before the progress of a shadow.
The feel of things, if I cherish, helps me live
more like a minute than a clock. Rain crossed
my neighbor's field at the speed of a million mouths
per second kissing corn. Just before my house,
it stopped, then started on the other side of my life
with a sound like the valley being told to hush.
At the mailbox, I saw the mailbox had been beaten again,
I sat, looked down the road at the fallen loaves
of metal bread. This is a ritual like dinner,
like wanting to know the secret the bat tells the hands
of the boy who leans out of a car, lit by radio glow
and a cigarette. In some, the refrain of blood
is swing away. If you put your ear to such a person,
you hear the ocean saying let me out. Some days,
it takes me a year to get the mail, to return home
with proof that we owe. There's a stick
I've had my eye on, I'll ask tomorrow
if it's ever considered being thrown.


Bob Hicok
The American Poetry Review
September/October 2005

I. things found here

Long Beach by no means
deals in the ocean with clean hands.
His hands, grungy, bear back from
waves to sand full of the dirty
things we say out into nothing
thinking they will not come back.

The things we say do not dissolve
out to open sea void of this congestion
we send them out from. Not in
Long Beach anyway.

Putting language into simple daily forms we can live from
aches and persists in one's guts
much like the healing that takes place from a girl
who once said it was funny how
I chewed, or when they first noticed my bow legs,
or a boy who said that you, he used the phrase,
are an ugly bitch whore. I have witnessed it here. And your language
was too profane, I did not know how to tell you I was sorry for what he said.

The beaches are good for questioning
all that has preceded.

Even in Long Beach the beaches are still good
for finding the muscle shells, seaweed, the half-buried
things in the sand, rinsing them off
in the breaking white surf.

II. things found here

Three themes:

First, looking back to make sense of the past, pervaded by a more and more vulnerable sense of my own personal presence in the poems, the presence of Long Beach, and images more true and less fabricated: hopefully poetry can help us heal.

Second, that depite the first, I would write more and more "I"-lessly. Meaning mostly that the word "I" would appear less and less.

Third, that joy would increasingly break through in my midst, that music would increasingly break through arduousness of content and doubt.

And lastly that images would prevail.

III. things found here

joy interupts mid
sentance to make noise
like pots banging on the street

because one poor fool has made the mistake to think
the new year has been found
somewhere in spring despite
what the rest have decided.

a child is born screaming
ecstatic, frightened, incited, squinting through slime and light
using limbs and movements as uncharted
as they are right.

joy is always waking with a sudden cry at the middle of the night.

Exhausting to keep hours so deviant
from manners and laws of discipline.

At the end of it we should all be left
with dark heavy eye lids, even
unconscious over our morning bowls of cereal,
the milk jug fallen over and pouring,
spilled milk everywhere.

my mother calls me on the phone

Outside in Long Beach
the music from a passing car
all tricked the hell out
bumps with a bass that has left several car alarms
sounding in its wake, angry
bad asses beating the air
with fists full of lyrics that I tend to give a nod to
as they gently grind me down to raw nerves and generally
more stringent expressions.

I balance it all, cell phone bills and a moment on the couch
looking at light in the curtains when I get home through the traffic.

What I can balance I do, my tiredness, my burning chest
to go out running
into figuratives, into abstractions,
into the streets of Long Beach with my arms flailing like a bad ass.

I'm sorry mom. I don't think it's gonna work out this time.

With the jets taking off of runways the way they do these days
you might think we have all grown so much closer.
I can't explain the distance between me and every human being
in line at the rite aid. I can't explain how too far home is
for me to travel, just now.

On tuesday morning after the holiday I will wake up
at three thirty again for work
and will not have seen my mother, will not have felt Oregon, will have kept
close to some progressive sense of balance,
too entirely far from my beginnings.