Plus Shipping

Buddha alarm clocks, Shiva spice racks, dying gardeners, gunned-down prostitutes, suicidal visionaries, and a god "who is shorter/and a better cook than your God" populate these poems that arrive Plus Shipping. Demanding our perception of the world in payment, Hicok shows us that time has "bones we can count/and a soul made temporal by math."

A Political Vision

A cellist in every lobby by love and law.
Even men with crows for eyes stop gnawing
the backs of necks when shouldering
through doors they're swathed
in plaintive air. It's good for the republic.
Like wine in ceremonious amounts--no--half
that, an eighth of what vigorous burghers
consume at weddings, the equivalent
of a finger dipped into a glass and lowered
into the mouth of a child--exactly
that much pleasure, that much sleep.
We tried violin and oboe, jazz sextets,
contrapuntal readings of Brecht by choirs
of Merit Scholars. Machetes were still
being drawn. Now this: the serenity
of elms in moonlight. Even failure
is work, even fatigue deserves its score.
Faure's Elegy dragged through clouds
of marble: the sensation of breath
bleeding out, hands gripping the rungs
of a sand ladder. And Bach, Suite 6,
allemande--as if every note
came from the knees, a hinge
to be bartered with, that must be asked
to sustain. Even on days when nothing
does, the mist of sound meanders,
shafts toward the woozy floors
where emotions are priced and assigned
spokesmodels. Hobbled instrument,
one-legged and leaning, accommodated
between the thighs, the cello nearly flesh,
essentially vocative. Like it knows names,
all of them, any we might invent,
and that what we feel comes from a hollow
that would moan if bowed.

© BOA Editions, Ltd 1998

Available editions:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Price: $12.50