"Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem" by Bob Hicok
Three memories, Or: why you should call up a friend and read a poem to her.
Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem My left hand will live longer than my right. The rivers of my palms tell me so. Never argue with rivers. Never expect your lives to finish at the same time. I think praying, I think clapping is how hands mourn. I think staying up and waiting for paintings to sigh is science. In another dimension this is exactly what's happening, it's what they write grants about: the chromodynamics of mournful Whistlers, the audible sorrow and beta decay of Old Battersea Bridge. I like the idea of different theres and elsewhere, an Idaho known for bluegrass, a Bronx where people talk like violets smell. Perhaps I am somewhere patient, somehow kind, perhaps in the nook of a cousin universe I've never defiled or betrayed anyone. Here I have two hands and they are vanishing, the hollow of your back to rest my cheek against, your voice and little else but my assiduous fear to cherish. My hands are webbed like the wind-torn work of a spider, like they squeezed something in the womb but couldn't hang on. One of those other worlds or a life I felt passing through mine, or the ocean inside my mother's belly she had to scream out. Here, when I say I never want to be without you, somewhere else I am saying I never want to be without you again. And when I touch you in each of the places we meet, in all of the lives we are, it's with hands that are dying and resurrected. When I don't touch you it's a mistake in any life, in each place and forever. —from Plus Shipping (BOA Editions, 1998)
September 2001
In truth I don’t remember what month it was, only that it was a blindingly sunny afternoon and I was living in my first Houston apartment, the bottom righthand unit of a four-plex that I could not afford. I regularly paid my rent late and was subject to endless harassment from the landlord’s wife, and I must have been despised by the other tenants; I threw loud parties, thrilled by my ability to turn out the entire program despite being a first year MFA candidate, entirely incognizant of the fact that I had neighbours. The woman across the hall was in medical school, and she regularly poked her head out of her back door as I sat on our shared stoop, drinking and smoking and talking on the phone late into the weeknight hours, to ask me to please shut up as only a Texan can ask such a thing. Her name was Jubilee. I didn’t even realize, until I was a homeowner and the new next-door neighbours lit up outside my bedroom window on their first night, what an absolute fucking menace I must have been.
The apartment had beautiful hardwood floors and crown molding and the sun poured in to the front room, where I’d put my desk. That’s where I was on the morning of 9/11 when the images of the first plane appeared, and I got the first confusing emails from East Coasters informing me, for some reason, that they were alright, and Jubilee came home eleven hours too early and turned on her television, which was when I finally cottoned on that the picture of the plane plowing into a skyscraper was not, as I’d assumed, a still from a new movie. It’s the room I return to each September, and so I guess that explains why Bob Hicok’s “Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem” is on my mind this week: one afternoon I came home from campus and saw the answering machine blinking on the desk in that sunny room, and when I hit play, a much-missed and faraway voice went straight from the title into line one. I know you can still do this, read poems on someone’s voicemail, but it’s not the same as coming through the door and looking, instinctively and with an unconsciously intense hope, for the little flashing numeral that means someone wanted to find you somewhere very specific, and they want you to know they dropped by. The familiar voice filling the room. I remember calling back with my own poem when I knew he wouldn’t be home.
May 2009
I guess I’ve been doing this for a while, foisting poem I can’t stop thinking about onto friends and passersby. I don’t remember passing this particular Hicok poem along, but I must have: it ended up as part of the ceremony in a dear friend’s wedding. I was maid of honour. The bride and I watched as the rest of the wedding party walked one by one down the aisle, and when only I was left, I turned to her and said: We can run away now, if you want! Among the most sincerely thoughtful and curious people I have ever known, she actually paused—not out of doubt, but out of consideration for me, a person she trusted, a person whose thoughts mattered to her.
Our mutual friend from graduate school delivered the reading, his Georgia accent perfectly matched to Hicok’s tenderness. It’s so vivid to me now: I have no visual imagination or memory, but I can hear it, his voice paired to those lines. For some reason I’m now doubting any of this—the pause, the poem—really happened. Loves, if it didn’t, let me keep this gentle fabrication anyway.
Late one night in the real world
You leave graduate school eventually, thank Christ, but that means you lose the people who will stay up all night drinking and reading poems out loud to you, ransacking the shelves of whatever apartment or bungalow you’ve landed in, tripping over one another to be the next to read, to follow the last poem with the perfect complement or companion. In jazz, it’s called trading fours, the musicians trading solos back and forth, creating a conversation, continuing it. Poets, I guess, mostly have to stop playing eventually. They grow up, get jobs, go to bed early.
Sometimes poets luck into jobs that find them up late after some literary happening out of town, too exhausted to think, too wired to sleep, and accompanied by some manuscripts. One such evening my colleague and I had a truly curious object to hand, some newly received poems by a writer we much admired. “Read it to me!” I said, and he did. I don’t remember the words, and only vaguely the subject, but he stopped, and we looked at one another, and agreed more or less wordlessly: it was terrible.
But what a pleasure, to be read a poem, after all those years. “Let’s stay up all night and read poems to each other,” I said. I was joking, but also not, but I also didn’t have any poems to read. Plenty to recite, indeed, including this one, but reciting is a very different animal, I once discovered, having decided on a whim at the open mic of the English department I was teaching in, to recite my poem instead. Immediately I realized I did not know where to look, let alone what to do with my hands; I remember the department head, who was seated directly in front of me, just a few rows back, was gazing with such rapt attention I felt genuinely embarrassed to have caused what appeared to be a profound moment of feeling in this man.
We divided up the books and took them to our rooms instead. I remember falling asleep, listening to the streetcar thunder down its rails, Hicok’s lines running their own familiar routes through my mind.
*
What happens to the voice when you read aloud? There’s the dreaded Poet Voice, the much-maligned, self-conscious, over-enunciation of poetry readings. Called forth from their lairs to represent their work out in the world, it’s easy for writers to confuse performing with reading. The anxiety of vulnerability manifests in contracted vocal cords, a voice that creeps up the back of the throat. But I love what happens to a voice that borrows someone else’s words and reads them to an audience of two, or one, or answering machine. It deepens, settles, the mind’s worries displaced by the trail set out for them to follow. One word after the next. It is captivating to be in the company of someone who’s fully in the present, released from the past, unmindful of the future, engaged solely in the task at hand: a gift you can conjure out of absolutely nothing. Yes, log off, touch grass, meditate, scream into a pillow, write your congressman. But also: call somebody up and read her a poem.
I can’t tell you how often, and recently, I thought about (all of) this…. I miss you.