BOB HICOK
He and his wife have split.
As an atom does when violently asked, when struck by a hammer
of some kind.
Release of energy sounds so polite, a bird of lightning
shown an open cage, a hurricane
issued a passport.
An hurricane, yes.
There are standards, I see that.
An hurricane in the shape of my friend is nine-ironing beer bottles
off the roof of his apartment.
That’s what he said he was going to do, his chin a smaller roof,
me on the opposite side of his car, eyes closed,
listening to his moon-dust voice,
voice of being two hundred and fifty thousand miles away.
Twenty years since someone told me, mine are not the toes for her,
not the bad breath of her dreams.
As if a saw—band or circular, your hardware, your choice—
cut through my shins and again just above the knees, a section
removed, one critical to standing, one certain to be noticed
in an inventory.
I’ve learned this much: empathy is shit.
Not to bother telling him, I’ve been there, as if being told to go away
is a place, magazines on cheap tables, mug shots of open sores
on the walls, a plant flowering eye teeth in the corner,
a window overlooking a trade school for maggots.
I get to kiss my wife any time her lips aren’t in another state,
they’ve been in Washington, Michigan, New York, her lips
would like to visit all fifty states by the time it’s over,
visit Greece, birth place of western lips, visit Paris,
City of Lips.
I could feel the wind before he left, knew his arms and legs, his hair,
were spinning around a center where nothing is felt, dead place
where the only sound is the word hello ripped on the head of a nail
poised above a knee cap, there’s a child, you see, sound of daddy
on the telephone, the coffin click of goodbye.
We’re poorly designed.
Too porous, too prone to flesh, we should be, not the wire
but what thrives in the wire, just hum, flow, all together
in a soup of plasma, fuck the differentiated self, the cliché
of identity, here’s to vanishing, to forgiving a man
shouting four before a rain shower of brown glass.
It could be, was you, is me, we all go boom, just wait, so what
exactly.
Which leaves only his swing to discuss, choice of clubs, those silly shoes
golfers wear, the ones with spikes in the bottom, like they’re at war
with grass.