A Poem for a Thursday #151

Bob Hicok is an American poet and a professor of creative writing at Virginia Tech. Before becoming a teacher, he owned and ran an automotive die design business. Hicok’s poetry is “known for its accessible, meditative style. Narrative and associational, his poems are at once funny and wry, poignant and silly, smart and sad: they offer varied portraits of the lives of working people, of violence and pop culture, while containing moments of unexpected beauty and trenchant observations on human nature.”

I don't have much time. I'm an important person
to chickadees and mourning doves, whose feeder
was smashed last night by a raccoon. Soon
I'll be wielding duct tape, noticing the dew,
wanting to bathe in it, hoping the awkwardness
of yesterday (three instances of people talking
with bear traps for mouths) never repeats itself
and we all go forward as if to a party 
for a five year old who refuses to smash candy
out of a burro. It's too cute, the burro, too real
for him not to ask his mother, can I keep it,
and when the other children cry, they're given
lake front property, it works out, this 
is what I see for you, the working out. Think of the year
behind you as a root or think of going to Spain
and feeling sorry for the bulls or don't think,
this isn't the SAT's, don't think but stay.
Stay happy, honest, stay as tall as you are
as long as you can using giraffes if you need to 
to see each other above the crowd. I have these moments
when I realize I'm not breathing, my wife
is never why I'm not breathing and always why
I want to lick a human heart, remember that each of you
is half of why your bed will sag toward the middle
of being a boat and that you both will sag 
if you're lucky together, be lucky together
and acquire in sagging more square footage
to kiss and to hold. And always remember
that I hate you for being so much closer
than I am to where none of us ever get to go
again--first look, first touch, first 
inadvertent brush of breath or hair, 
first time you turned over and looked at who was surprising 
you by how fully she was there.  

Happy first anniversary (in anticipation of your thirty-ninth)
Bob Hicok

Brona shared another poem this week.