Team Effort

Ed Ochester Presents a Poem by Bob Hicok

“Few writers have a stronger word-of-mouth among poetry fans than Bob Hicok, and his poems are everywhere. Why? Well, perhaps because his quasi-meditative poems sound like colloquial, idiosyncratic speech, but hone in on larger truths like heat-seeking missles.”

—Ed Ochester


Team Effort

Everyone at the same time if everyone at the same time
looked up from coffee looked up from crotch looked up
if everyone at night at dawn at lunch looked up
at the black at the blue morsel sky at the congress
of clouds of stars looked up from needle from packets
of buzzing from the wedding of dollars if everyone
in Queens in Wembley if everyone in my head if everyone
looked up from electroshock from drift if everyone
threw back the appetite of the eyes threw back the village
of the head the persistence of the skull if everyone thought
I am the vanishing point I am the frontal lobe of wind
if everyone stood and raised their wings and tuned
their orchestra if the census stood the tens of
stood the billions of stood the Earth would move
the circle would move the spinning would move if everyone
at the same time opened their mouth let the wolf
of their uvula go the rivers would stare at us
again would return to our faces the expressions
they carried away to the ocean to bury in the ocean
to save in case we ever came back.

Bob Hicok

“Team Effort” from The Best American Poetry (edited by Ed Ochester)