Poetry |

“A person,” “Pedagogy” and “How do I compare thee to anything we know: a song of climate change”

A person

 

is lightning striking the same spot everyday,

a little electricity that speaks Portuguese

or reads Kundera again after thirty years

with a bowler hat on her head. It’s likely

the person I’m thinking of was also covered in bees

under her skin: I should have asked. Now she’s gone

and her husband doesn’t know, her mother, her doctor,

her horoscope, her banjo, her dead roses

if she’s dead or alive. No note, just a small gap

in the clothes in her closet, a crushed phone

in the drive. A person is a diary in a safe

in cement on Ganymede if she wants to be,

not even our near and nameless moon. I’d like

to vanish too. Into nothing. Into something

like feeling who I’ll be in the future

whispering behind me now

to go left instead of right, live naked

in the woods, put down the hammer that is

a man’s hand before walking into the house.

I used to think she was lucky

but in hindsight I know the centuries

will conclude that none of this is real,

this poem or air, this story or scar: a person

is the ache of a star to be light again

moving at the speed of itself, unfettered,

untouchable by the missings of flesh

for flesh, is for was, near for far.

 

*     *     *     *     *     *

 

Pedagogy

 

The red haired green eyed woman to my left is alone

she tells me in a note and tired of being the only lesbian

in this room. I look around. Of the thirteen other

possible lesbians, I rule out eleven based on purses

and shoes. I write this back to her and she agrees.

I’m the teacher so passing notes is fine

with the authorities. We’re both bored

with the presentation on Charles Olson.

I seem to remember that “Projective Verse”

wasn’t reprinted in a volume celebrating his work,

as if the editors recognized a fart disguised as an essay

when they smelled it. The presenter would have done better

to twirl flaming machetes. His voice sounds like a shoe

being drowned. She writes that the two possible lesbians

would make an attractive couple. I marry them

in Tahiti and get a little drunk on sunshine

in my thoughts. I don’t know what to write to her:

that everyone is alone like a key to a safe in the safe

at the bottom of a well at the bottom of a sea?

Her solitude is not my solitude, which can wear

a live alligator on its head and still hide in the open.

I’m trying to get her to say what she says to me

in these notes in her poems, but a note

is the most private genre after the shopping list.

I finally suggest that she open a gay bar

in the northeast corner of the room. She asks

what to call it and I tell her I’m just an idea man,

execution is up to her. But I have no guillotine,

she writes back just as the student finishes

hurting me inadvertently with his passion.

The red haired green eyed woman is next. The note

she gives me as she stands confesses that she’d rather

eat a rat while it’s shitting out the remains

of the smaller rat it ate than stand in front of people

who probably hate her. As she writes “Audre Lorde”

on the board, I write “Audre Lorde” in my notebook

and underline her name twice. I try to make the word

“theater” out of “hate her” but need another t

and one less h. I really want to read the poems

in which her solitude speaks to mine like two new kids

in first grade sharing potato chips on the edge

of a playground while throwing their carrots at a turtle.

We’ll see what happens in this life and the next.

I don’t know how to teach people a thing, I write on a note

I give myself. That’s OK, I write back: what you lack

in intelligence you make up for in sly hug

of the gravity of body mass. I wish I believed him

but he’ll say anything to suggest that everyone’s

running around with a parachute on their back

and a hand on the rip cord so why not help each other

find the escape hatch or ground the plane due to the fog

we’re in. As if life’s as simple as levitation

or the perfect martini: eighteen parts gin

and three parts gin and gin and an olive orchard

and don’t bother with a glass and gulp and gin.

 

*     *     *     *     *     *

 

How do I compare thee to anything we know: a song of climate change

 

In summer a windshield used to be an abattoir,

I drove through winged carnage and at now-

and-then gas stations, squeegeed it off. The whole way

to the Pacific from the terrific Midwest,

I stared at western expansion through an oozy paste

of bugs. Took decades to notice the lessing

 

of that mess. To pick up my rope and lasso trees

and tombstones, lasso an ice shelf the size

of Manhattan, an ice shelf the size

of everyone who ever queued to rise up

the Eiffel Tower and smooch

in front of Paris. What can I do to help

 

besides twirl a rope: sit with friends

who look like me and friends who look

like BF Skinner and give the world

the shirts off our backs. Take a big problem

 

and fold it in half, fold that whole in half

and that whole in thirds and that whole

seventy times and swallow it with a glass of milk

to shine my bones. I don’t know. I am sure

 

we’re running out of ice shelves

to compare landmasses to: poor Cuba, Zug

and Rhode Islands, me and you. An ice shelf the size

 

of how sorry we’ll be

that we didn’t do something sooner

about garroting Antarctica

would go from here to the moon if the moon

were as far as any of every star

we’ve made a wish on. I remember this

 

from a recent trip: spotless windshield. From my youth:

being younger. From my younger

and hungrier summers: a cornucopia of libido

and moths and mosquitos. From a car

alarm this morning: wake up.

Contributor
Bob Hicok

Bob Hicok’s most recent collection of poems is Hold (Copper Canyon, 2018). Water Look Away: A Novella will be published by Copper Canyon in 2020.

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