Things I nev­er would have said at the job interview

As an exe­cu­tion­er, I’d have been inclined
to show the dead man’s head
his dead man’s body
after the whisk of the guillotine,
giv­ing his mouth
a last chance to move
in the shapes of a name
he’d nev­er say again, Catherine
is a love­ly set of sounds
or to stare at his eyes
in the midst of their unknowing
what this new thing is
that had begun, lat­er sketching
this falling through himself
as a can­dle flame
fought for its life beside me,
or to work a field, even if I owned
noth­ing, even if land
didn’t exist, at night,
after the blade, the hold­ing, the sketching,
back and forth, to and fro,
in every direction
it was pos­si­ble to ask
an unwhipped horse to help me
plow moon­light under

After

How many times I’ll say yes when she asks
if the dead man is in the oth­er room
get­ting dressed I can’t know, or if this is an ocean
we’re all walk­ing across the bot­tom of,
hold­ing hands or a few of us waltzing
while dressed in spoons and bul­let cas­ings, moonlight
far above pre­tend­ing to be God
by ignor­ing us, sev­en or sev­en hundred
are num­bers, and the one time I say no, he’s not there,
he’s dead, I’m pun­ished immediately
when noth­ing changes, not her expression
or the shape of the room, I hear the same
mourn­ing dove coo­ing in her head
that has lived there for years, alone

A request

The fact of an end. All the lasts. Last look,
breath. Of watch­ing and knowing
what I watched. Press­ing my expe­ri­ence of her
as lean­ing, no mat­ter how sick she was, forward,
into time, up against stones, desks, thimbles,
all the unsouled bits, the hard­ness­es, the castings
of unmo­ti­vat­ed shad­ows, to look for a word
in their dry vocab­u­lar­ies that would shape her vanish
into the ring­ing of a bell. The fact of gone
hav­ing a moment. Coor­di­nates at which I stood
and have since lived stuck, look­ing then and now
down at a bed, look­ing then and now
for an arm to move as an arm had moved, we say
count­less though I could have count­ed the times.
Look­ing there when there has ceased
to be a place, look­ing when
when when has ceased to be a point, is an always, a virus
of mem­o­ry. And then
she was aper­ture, pore, mouth, anus, vagina.
She was the opened Earth and I was Orpheus, I am
Orpheus, please the removal of my head
to the riv­er, the sev­er­ing of my singing
tum­bling all the way to the for­get­ting sea.

Think of bird tracks in snow

Turn­ing. The soft pages. Of the bible.
For their own sake. Not to read. Turning.
John. Turn­ing. Acts. Turn­ing. The silence of.
A room. At one o’clock. Reminds me. Of the confession.
Of a gourd. The sighs of. Gar­den­ers. When I bring.
The tongue. Of my ear. To their blooms. Turning.
The diet of. Paper. The begin­ning of. Time. Turning.
Res­ur­rec­tion. The pli­ant. Begats. I hold.
An homuncu­lus. Of wombs. Pages soft. As lungs.
As breath. Brush­ing blood. With air. Turning.
Lan­guage. I skip. Words. For the weight. The wait.
To fill myself. With the pos­ture. Of reading.
Signs. Before the actu­al. Read­ing of. Wishes.
To ask. Noth­ing. To teach me. How to be.
A lis­ten­ing. Inside a. Being heard.

Bob Hicok’s most recent book is “Words for Emp­ty and Words for Full” (Pitt, 2010).