prayer leaves the lips like leaves

1.
Prayer leaves the lips like leaves
fallen on the surface of that water
which moves slowest down streams.

2.
Behind quiet
we were afraid to stay.

Behind the boredom and fidgeting
of hours, the feeling of God
staring
pins one down
so that it is difficult to breath. Behind

God—the dishes pile up, a woman
on 5th street drools outside the convalescent
home, the birds on Fourth Street and Cherry
swoop down from telephone wires and poles
in flurries, electric inner city, mad with
the littered lots, the tagged walls, the shuffling
psychosis of an elder man who yells into pay phones,
the indifferent gleaming of traffic, the window shops,
and one styrofoam coffee cup atop a public mailbox.

3.
It was so hot today everyone was buying icecream
from the truck with its high pitched static melodies.

But the day will get cooler in a few hours. We can
open the windows then and let the warmth go
from inside, let slight breezes be, let the sky be
still faintly lit.

4.
Asleep later, I took my unhappiness
off like a bundle from my travel weary back
and tossed it down at the base of a silouetted tree,
his crazy arms thrown up above the black rim of earth.

We can rest our minds just like that.

5.
Some crazy men have resisted all dark
to follow the fleeing edge of light,
and it has always meant not stopping.

the real saints hung

The real saints hung
their hearts in heaven, their only cloak
on the door hook, with thin white
legs, thin hair, hung their modest
prayers mid-air.

The real saints burrowed each gospel word of theirs
in the ground, ate the locust they found. Piety
put holes it their sandles, so they washed each other's feet.
They would eat at a wooden table, dim light. In the commune gardens
burrowed their lonliness to dig up what they might.

Christians go sick with themselves (so full of freeways, so barren).
They swear the graces of God have gone still
as surfaces of lakes in morning will: our lives,
the long slow wings of a heron, so methodically
near but never breaking surface, façade, veneer.

So, we wait in lines at McDonald's,
impatient. So, we run
away from meditation, from secret.

And I can not say I see it, but do not despair
all you who suffer from a Kingdom we fail
to receive here. We are real, and still
simply become as the one real saint who hung.

Only repent. It has all already been done.

translucent, I think

Up in a tree, maybe a silly place
for me to be at twenty three,
to see how the air gets thin.

The air does not. Wonderful how science will lead you
inevitably into the rediscovery of some forsaken childhood tendancy.

Back then I went to climb
closer to God, I told people.
Really I went to stick my head in the spinning stratosphere
and get a view of all the kingdoms
of the earth and their glory, namely the cul-de-sacs,
alley ways and small patches of field still left undeveloped
that I ruled on my bicycle as a kid.

Up in a tree for scientific reasons, now I tell people.
Really I just feel a little far away from God, maybe.
I go to think things through, find self
acceptance or whatever
magic the clouds have to hang so delicately
alone
so high it hurts the neck to watch.

Up in a tree for the pit of the stomach pain in me:
a pair of shoes with their laces tied all up in knots.
I mean lots and lots of knots like
the game I used to play with my dad’s shoes to see
if he could always untie everything.

If only every exasperation, every at a loss,
could be cut off
without losing what might actually be hurting for good reasons
just not heard by anyone yet.

I sit alone in rooms. I go on walks. I let words get carried away
on adventurous tarings out through brush and rock to see what they say
from inside me. Now I even climb trees again to hear if the hurting
will use it's voice if I manage to go with him to the right hideaway
or high enough up over everyone else's daily business.

I have tried to be as translucent, I think,
as cirrus. But as for the clouds, they
can not just simply receive me either.

pilaging goes on (reading Allen Ginsberg recently)

The freeway faster loud
exhaust pilaging

goes on. Pilaging like
taking a more cautious man’s eyes and turning them down in a speeding wake,
eyes that look on billboards of Corona life perfected
only feet from that cautious man’s daily treading back and forth
between labor and release, labor and flickering images of blue
at night, in many many windows,
private windows, fridgerators humming all,
toilets sighing all after the midnight peeing blank
stares into the inevitability of well timed alarms
forcing cars back onto the highways.

Treadmill running goes more subtly
than the disappearance of laughter
after the last drunken joke in a bar before dispersals.

More subtle than the half empty feeling of every place
with alcohol and t.v.'s and ambiance, to say nothing
of the servers who mostly smile and will ask for requests.

More subtle than poems written about ladies
with extended left arms out drivers’ windows holding
cigarettes in the traffic of the 405 South on a Friday.

Such ingress and egress cannot be healthy
when the beaches charge twelve dollars for parking,
the city meters empty on weekends, lawn mowers
now every day of the week pushed by hispanics
with tennis shoes stained grean.

The western man is going places in planes
and cars, less on trains, we mean

to run away only to return towards
what can not really ever be taken as ours.

The farmer's skin black or dark
stands in the tomato feilds
between Bakersfeild and Fresno.

The trucks take their loads grean piled
toward many places across the earth
all of which named Albertson's, Stater Brothers', Von's, Ralph's.

of sunshine through swaying

Through the window bring in
the late morning light and wind.

they will teach like

how to kiss a cheek,
how to splash in water:

how simple a shadow is, contours
of sunshine through swaying
curtains, playing over my bare feet.

on the news this evening

The lights go out in Los Angeles. The slow loss
of electricity now undeniable,
points of intersecting
traffic backed up miles
motionless: the sun
can only be let to fall, it's last mettalic
lightening dazzles itself down
the mirrored windows
of the U.S. Bank building, we can not but let now
the darkness fall.

These stalwarts, steadfast
and secure, do not always hold up well
under the deteriorating sky,
above deteriorating dirt, built
by deteriorating human
sweat and their crying
glory like the lightening
of last bits of sunshine
gone dazzling now down the glass
walls, Los Angeles,
into dark.

Enter into dark
and repentance.

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.