Tone Poem

By Bob Hicok

Issue 48 • Fall 2023 • Poetry

Before I can see the mountain, I see the mountain.
Black trees. The shape of a woman’s hip
on her side, her hand brushing over a lake
with an open palm, the water cool, calm.
So much of what I remember hasn’t happened yet.
A quiet house clears its throat. A god comes in,
takes off his armor, removes his heart and feeds it
to a dog. He needs a story in which he dies.
I need to catch the mouse chewing on my wires
and read a book with her until the sun goes down.
I do not want to kill the dark by turning on the light,
and to speak means I am interrupting the moon.
You were saying. The person who taught me to drive
showed me how to do it with my eyes closed. Step one:
never get in a car. Step two: keep a life in each pocket.
Step three: consider taping your head to another’s,
and those two to a third, and so on. The tape
was figurative, the connection literal, and the extent
infinite. I am currently seven billion elsewheres
to some degree. Being here, though, in this chair,
this breath, has always been tricky. Do you ever wonder
if seven or eight of the bones or one or two
of the nodes of emotion were left out and thrown away
when the workbench was cleared of the memory of you?
A stone is a stone wherever you go but a person
can be a stone in a very soft shirt and not know
where this shirt came from or who they should thank
for this life, if at all.

Bob Hicok

Bob Hicok is the author of Water Look Away (Copper Canyon Press, 2023). He has received a Guggenheim and two NEA Fellowships, the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress, nine Pushcart Prizes, and was twice a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in nine volumes of the Best American Poetry.

JC Alfier

JC Alfier’s (they/them) most recent book of poetry, The Shadow Field, was published by Louisiana Literature Press (2020). Journal credits include The Emerson Review, Faultline, New York Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, Penn Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Vassar Review. They are also an artist doing collage and double-exposure work.