#2

my fingers trace the words
in your letter.
Three pages
.
I see how you struggled
to keep the lines straight
with an imaginary stencil, correcting
as they drooped. Words
.
in your language hide you
in the corners. The pictures of a not so pink
sunset taken from your window
make me smile
.
There is no hint of rain
The drone of construction drowns
sounds of life and I wish
.
poetry was dead. You wrote
.
you would like
to die into the love you have as pieces
of cloud dissolve in sunlight
.
.
As youth sets the sky ablaze
the wrinkles on your face will become yesterday's
.
lines and I will read them.
Again

Exams

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 elsewheres, 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.

Bob Hicok

#1

As a poet
I derive beauty and strength
from nature
.
The way it is
in 3-D, the smallest action
(like the falling of
a leaf) becomes monumental
.
In this field of sunflowers
I see unconditional love
that made these flowers
change their colour
.
the love
that never lets them turn their face
away from the sun
.
ten years from now
with eyes closed
I would remeber every detail
the slightest movement
.
the way gold contrasted with green
light breeze on my face
how love felt, so close
.
end

A poem a day is better than none at all.

As The Poems Go
.
as the poems go into the thousands you
realize that you've created very
little.
.
it comes down to the rain, the sunlight,
the traffic, the nights and the days of the
years, the faces.
.
leaving this will be easier than living
it, typing one more line now as
a man plays a piano through the radio,
the best writers have said very
little
and the worst,
far too much.
.
Charles Bukowski