Odyssey

Odyssey


I sat in different places with different winds:
at the top of the drive where the blue weeds grow;
on the bench with hammering, the sound of a house
I couldn't see being built in the woods, child
of a green womb. Rain was coming, clouds a scarf
thrown across the sun. There might not be a spot
that wants me, I could wander my yard
and never fit this grass, the fence of rusted holes.
Beside the tongue of a shovel left out over night,
I laid my head, my fingers four more dreams
a daddy-longlegs touched in a blind world,
there's that longer leg that's not a leg,
it's a telegram sent out before the progress of a shadow.
The feel of things, if I cherish, helps me live
more like a minute than a clock. Rain crossed
my neighbor's field at the speed of a million mouths
per second kissing corn. Just before my house,
it stopped, then started on the other side of my life
with a sound like the valley being told to hush.
At the mailbox, I saw the mailbox had been beaten again,
I sat, looked down the road at the fallen loaves
of metal bread. This is a ritual like dinner,
like wanting to know the secret the bat tells the hands
of the boy who leans out of a car, lit by radio glow
and a cigarette. In some, the refrain of blood
is swing away. If you put your ear to such a person,
you hear the ocean saying let me out. Some days,
it takes me a year to get the mail, to return home
with proof that we owe. There's a stick
I've had my eye on, I'll ask tomorrow
if it's ever considered being thrown.


Bob Hicok
The American Poetry Review
September/October 2005