Elegy Owed by Bob Hicok

Elegy Owed Reviews

• 
  Ken

  When I discover a new writer or poet, I'm not one to dive into their oeuvre and read every last vowel (v and r notwithstanding). I will, however, dip into a second book by same before moving on to that good night called variety in life. You know, before death makes off with all the variety, leaving us with humdrum sameness (the hallmark of nothingness, which took forever to crawl out of before birth).
  
  But where was I? Oh, yeah. Goodreads. Reviews. At 5:45 a.m. when I have the energy for them. And Bob Hicok #2, if you will (or even if you won't). Kind of an uncanny poet walking the tightrope between wordplay and serious poetry. Not that serious poetry cannot be playful (see Bard comma Bill). Here, for instance, in a poem called...
  
  
  Obituary for the middle class
  
  This whole thing, this way of living beside a can opener
  beside a microwave beside a son beside a daughter
  beside a river going to college, you get up
  and kiss the mortgage and go go go with coffee-veins
  and burger-fries and pack your soul on ice
  till sixty-five, when you sit down with a lake
  and have a long talk with your breath
  and cast your mind far away from shore, fish nibbling
  the mosquitoes of your thoughts: they will whisper of this life
  a hundred years from now to children before sleep
  who will call them liars, "Once upon a time,
  they had two and a half bathrooms and tiny houses
  for their cars and doctors who listened
  through tubes to their fat hearts, they named
  their endeavors and beliefs four-wheel drive,
  twenty-percent-off sale, summer vacation, colonoscopy,
  variable-rate loan, inheritance, and we will be
  as gods to them in that they don't believe in us,
  and we will be spared the eternity of their worship
  as they will be spared money, the counting
  and the having and the memory of the middle share
  of what gets harder and harder to call pie.
  
  
  Well, OK. Maybe a missed landing at the end, but before that, a rather fun ride, don't you think? And I like Hicok's affinity for Dylan Thomas's affinity. Namely hyphenated adjectives. I keep a store myself, in case one of my waiting-to-be-written poems needs pizz or zazz or both.
  
  More, Jeeves? OK. My fingers are still limber at this hour, doing coffee-mug-handle lifts and all. One, two, three, five. This one's called...
  
  
  Leave a Message
  
  When the wind died, there was a moment of silence
  for the wind. When the maple tree died, there was always a place
  to find winter in its branches. When the roses died, I respected the privacy
  of the vase. When the shoe factory died, I stopped listening
  at the back door to the glossolalia of machines.
  When the child died, the mother put a spoon in the blender.
  When the child died, the father dug a hole in his thigh
  and got in. When my dog died, I broke up with the woods.
  When the fog lived, I went into the valley to be held
  by water. The dead have no ears, no answering machines
  that we know of, still we call.
  
  
  This one does nail the landing. And it utilizes the "Buy Again" item that is always in my Amazon cart (or would be if I shopped there), anaphora. Can't get me enough of that stuff. Sounds like a Grecian urn. Sounds like it should be a more pedestrian Greek urn. Sounds like it doesn't make any noise, like a poem that falls in the woods while all the lumberjacks and jills are at the shore reading novels.
  
  Novels like Medusa's gaze, I guess. Spellbinding. Stoned as a stoner getting high on life and on the munchies. Novels run the crime syndicate of literature, all right.
  
  But you were asking (before Keats coughed and distracted you with his ode-ious urns) what glossolalia means. The cardinal rule, my friends -- right behind the bluebird one -- is to look up words you don't know in a poem. According to Merriam and her good bedfellow Webster, and I quote:
  
  1. Fabricated and nonmeaningful speech, especially such speech associated with a trance state or certain schizophrenic syndromes.
  
  2. The gift of tongues; the ability to speak foreign languages without having consciously learned them. This power is asserted to be sometimes present in somnambulistic persons.
  
  3. The gift of tongues. Farrar.
  
  Farrar? I have no idea. And I sense glossolalia crawling into this review like a ninja lizard, fabricating with its slithery tongue, reinforcing definitions with its scaly-dry skin. And I need another coffee. Which means this review is over. Not just overrun with glossolalia, but with its will to go on. Even if my reading of Bob Hicok books is not. For now, it is. But forever -- before the BIG forever -- no.
  
  No sirree, Bob (Hicok).
• 
  Leah

  This is something against the idea that poetry should sing or poetry should trouble or poetry should deconstruct or poetry should...should...defenestrate?
  
  What I mean is, three weeks after hearing the author read, I still remember something about his wife's feet the day I heard the reading. I can not say the same about my own feet, or my own (well I don't have a wife). And I can say the feeling I associated with his wife's feet, at say sometime between 8-9 pm on that Monday evening: tenderness, want, some warmth that was maybe the warmth of the crowd at the reading but more likely something else, like the resurrection of something, something I'd rather not admit to.
  
  I mean, Hicok does poetry of affect, but with objects, strangeness, his wife, his father, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches: real, mundane things, things you wouldn't think twice about over the course of 24 hours, drive by things --
  
  and that's sort of amazing.
• 
  Gabriel Congdon

  Play some of them Mahler funereal jams. I like the one in 1 where he puts that french nursery rhyme in a minor then throws in some klezmer for the sake of it. That scherzo's alright.
  
  
  Yakka, the play of language supreme. Like savant gymnast tykes taking a playground to its furthest limits. A line with such a dash, us audience readers are like, “wow, such pretty words, and juxtaposed too.” And it's nobel enough to poet and do that.
  
  And I don't like to grunge, but after so many poems, the poet's talents begin to look like tricks. Maybe if this collection wasn't so damn long he could have made it in-out, his act revealed after too many acts. His use of repetition begins to tire.
  These effects take effect perhaps sooner, and perhaps with more sigh due to the very upfront foreground frontage. Poems tell you exactly what they are. There's no confusment here, no mystery.
  To rope the poet some slack, perhaps the kind of bereavement these poems moan to, care not for obfuscation. The immediacy of death scatters such pretenses. Maybe. Just how will the talented gymnasts can dance dirges has yet to redifferentiated in the old Processing Plant (my mind)
  
  I shall give the book 4 stars even though I only gave it 3 in the thing.
  
• 
  James Murphy

  I liked best that Hicok's poetry is quirky. Just looking at the cover showing a photo of himself with an ear to the ground listening for the dead Hicok below puts you in the right frame of mind. Inside you discover it's an appropriate image for poems which seem to be about mourning. There are elegies here, and odes, and they segue into an elegy ode and finally to an elegy owed before they say goodbye. These poems are both funny and sad.
• 
  Caitlin N.

  I can't believe I didn't review this already. It was my introduction to Hicok and my favorite out of all the poetry I read for poetry class last semester. It's the only one I bought and kept and plan to re-read.
• 
  Jerry Oliver

  This book of poems was devastatingly beautiful. No other description is suffice. Just read it if you dig excellent original poetry.
• 
  Peycho Kanev

  Elegy with lies
  
  This lost person I loved. Loved for a hundred years.
  When I find her. Find her in a forest. In a cabin
  under smoke and clouds shaped like smoke. When I find her
  and call her name (nothing) and knock (nothing)
  and build a machine that believes it’s God and the machine
  calls her name (nothing) and knocks (nothing).
  When I tear the machine down and she runs from the cabin
  pointing a gun at my memories and telling me
  to leave, stranger, leave, man of hammers.
  When I can’t finish that story. When I get to the gun
  pointed at my head. When I want it to go off.
  When everything I say to anyone all day long
  is bang. That would be today. When I can’t use her name.
  All day long. Soft as cotton, tender as kiss. Bang.
  
  O
  
  I’m thinking I watched a man and his son holding hands as they crossed a parking lot
  last night, thinking I was moved by the root or lifeboat or ladder of the father’s arm
  into the life of the son, the root or labyrinth of his arm as they moved at the pace
  of the child, whose walking still bore signs of the womb, of being wobbly water and I wanted
  to reverse my vasectomy on the spot and have a child with the moon, I wish there were a word
  that was the thing it was the word of, that when I said sun I could be sun, all of it in my mouth,
  burning, you might think and be so marvelously right about praise that you open your door
  one day and the day walks in and stays for years
  
  Elegy to hunger
  
  There’s a strain of cannibalism
  I admire. A beloved has died. A hole
  has been dug to be filled or a boat dragged
  across a mile of silence to burn
  upon the forgetfulness of water. One person
  or twenty stand at the hole or the boat
  & the body stares through closed eyes. The body
  turning gray, filling with clouds, with a rain
  that will last until flood. One person
  takes a bite and means it, not a nibble
  but a devotion, we are locusts
  after all. Then the others,
  until the body is clothed
  with unspeaking ghosts
  of mouths, the body an absence
  bearing absences. The bite. The soul.
  The swallow. Eating the hours
  she filled, the shadow she cast. And I.
  I should have.
• 
  Mark

  Scarecrow overhears himself thinking
  
  I love crows, so midnight at noon. Me,
  a suit stuck on sticks
  that no longer suits your life. As if this aways
  who you are, your self-imposed
  supposes: suppose this is it -- this field,
  this light? What does, anyway, fill you
  if not sun up or down, if not harvest,
  yield? We should switch, I'll hop off
  and gimp around, you'll hang
  among scavengers for company,
  for keeps, your straw-thoughts pecked
  by wind. Are you me alive or am I you
  dead? I lied: I hold my arms wide
  not to shoo but greet, to say
  to plunder, "feel free, dig in."
  
• 
  Grady

  Musings on death and loss and aspects of enduring
  
  Bob Hicok surprises us on every page of this latest collection of his poems. He deals with death and mourning in his own language, his own perspective and the result is some of the more initially tough and yet beautifully constructed poems we are finding at the moment. Some background: Bob Hicok is an American poet, born in 1960. He currently is an associate professor of creative writing at Virginia Tech. He is from Michigan and before teaching owned and ran a successful automotive die design business. Gritty, complicated, and earnest, Elegy Owed breaks--then salvages--the rules for mourning. While poet Bob Hicok remembers the departed as ephemera or skin cells, fog is invited to tea and the beauty of dandelion fluff is held for ransom. Hicok's language is so humid with expectation and fearlessness that his poems create a clandestine manual to survival.
  
  According to the Poetry Foundation, `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 and stories of working people, violence, pop culture, unexpected beauty, and trenchant observations on human nature. Over the course of his career, Hicok has evolved into one of contemporary poetry's most popular poets.'
  
  Some examples of Hicok's poetry follow:
  THE ORDER OF THINGS
  
  Then I stopped hearing from you. Then I thought
  I was Beethoven's cochlear implant. Then I listened
  to deafness. Then I tacked a whisper
  to the bulletin board. Then I liked dandelions
  best in their afro stage. Then a breeze
  held their soft beauty for ransom. Then no one
  throws a Molotov cocktail better
  than a Buddhist monk...
  
  from NOTES FOR A TIME CAPSULE
  The word terror
  I'll bury the word terror
  to be free of the word terror......
  If terror is said
  seven times in a row, it loses meaning becomes
  humdrum, a mere timpani of ear.
  If terror is said seven hundred
  thousand million trillion times, I am being raped
  by a word.
  
  ODE TO ONGOING
  I'm driving along,
  or painting a board or wondering
  if we love animals because we can't talk with them
  more intimately that we can't talk with God
  and the whole time there's this background hum
  of sex and devotion and fear, people telling
  good-night stories or leaving their babies
  in dumpsters but mostly working hard
  to feed the future what it needs to grow strong
  and prefer sweet over sour, consonance
  to dissonance, to be the only creatures who notice
  the stars or at least use them metaphorically
  to go on and on about the longing we harbor
  in such tiny spaces relative to the extent
  of our dread that we're in this all alone.
  
  This is a book of powerful, exquisitely crafted poetry, poems that we can't ignore if we are to find a meaning to existence when all else is contradicting our attempts at positive thoughts. Bob Hicok is a major poet.
  
  Grady Harp
• 
  Patricia Murphy

  You know how people always ask a poet who their favorite poets are? Well, I have an easy enough answer there. Bob Hicok has been on my list for years. I first heard his work at an off-site reading at AWP Chicago and I was instantly hooked by his intelligent yet emotionally charged poems. As I've said before, there's no reason we all can't have a little fun even though we are writing/reading poems. I adore Bob's sense of humor.
  
  He does things with poems that are equivalent to magic tricks--he surprises me in ways I never thought poems could. Almost every line is a turn of phrase that delights me. That I wish I had written. It’s hard, even, to make a list of my favorite moments in this book because there are so many.
  
  Some of my favorite moments:
  
  “My heart is cold,
  it should wear a mitten.”
  
  “Each poem a breath
  nailed to nothing.”
  
  “When everything I say to anyone all day long
  is bang.”
  
  “You open your door
  and the day walks in and stays for years.”
  
  “my life the only thing that has been with me
  my whole life.”
  
  “The rain is pregnant with a shape
  exactly like you.”
  
  “Women are more likely to wear gardens.”
  
  “ Where else could you fit the sky but the sky?”
  
  “the sun is doing meth on the other side of the world.”
  
  “When the wind died there was a moment of silence
  for the wind.”
  
  “Then I buried a phone.
  Then the ground rang. Then I answered the ground.”
  
  “when you stand before a painting
  in a museum for as long as you hope
  says something good about you.”
  
  “I thought the tree had climbed the boy.”
  
  “I have been the calendar called Monday Monday Monday.”
  
  “I have treated the afterbirth better than my child.”
  
  “No more apologizing for the rudeness of bombs.”
  
  “In all other skies, this cloud is a lie.”
  
  Years ago, Bob was even kind enough to send me some work to publish in
  Superstition Review.
• 
  Aseem Kaul

  Quite possibly Hicok's best book yet. I've always admired Hicok for the way his poems are always surprising, always unexpected, the way they make connections that seem bizarre until they turn out to be exactly right. Combine that kind of lyrical wit with an exuberance of language and you have one of the finest comic poets writing today.
  
  In Elegy Owed, however, Hicok channels his considerable gifts into darker currents, creating poems that, while still fluid and sparkling on the surface, are tugged at by a deep tide swell of loss. The result is a collection of poems that are at once joyous and heartbreaking, that convey, in their weird, off-kilter beauty, a sense of mourning more authentic for being so far removed from cliche. Here, for instance, is an extract from 'Elegy to hunger':
  
  "One person
  takes a bite and means it, not a nibble
  but a devotion, we are locusts
  after all. Then the others,
  until the body is clothed
  with unspeaking ghosts
  of mouths, the body an absence
  bearing absences. The bite. The soul.
  The swallow. Eating the hours
  she filled, the shadow she cast. And I.
  I should have."
  
  It's an unforgettable image, and one that achieves its power by being simultaneously so far outside our commonplace experience, and yet so mesmerisingly vivid. It's passages like these that make Elegy Owed one of the finest new collections I've read this year.
• 
  Jeffrey (Akiva) Savett

  Bob Hicok very well might be my new favorite poet. I've taught his poem, "Alzheimer's" in my class for many years, admired his work, but never gotten my hands on one his collections.
  
  Hicok's poetry exhibits almost everything I want my own work to do. He is funny, accessible, quirky, deeply profound, surprising, surreal, philosophical, and irreverent---often all in the same poem. For instance, in "O," watch how Hicok swerves between sacred and profane, high and low but always with the promise of saying these old things anew: "the child, whose walking still bore signs of the womb, of being/wobbly water and I wanted//to reverse my vasectomy on the spot and have a child with the moon,/I wish there were a word//that was the thing it was the word of, that when I said sun I could be/sun, all of it in my mouth."
  
  Hicok is concerned throughout this work and his work in general with the inability of language to say what he wants it to say; yet he is stuck with it and that's where all of his surreal brilliance becomes, not just cutesy intellectual trickery, but real and deep attempts to find ways for language to contain the energy of what the language says.
  
  If you like poetry at all and haven't read Hicok, this is a must read. I know I'm off to order his other books as soon as I complete this.
• 
  Dan

  I'm becoming quite a big fan of Bob Hicok. I first came across him via
  this poem he wrote about the Virginia Tech shooting (he teaches there).
  
  I've now read his latest poetry collection, Elegy Owed, and realized he writes some really terrific poetry on the subject of death and loss. The important thing to note is that it is not writing about death in a depressing or self-pitying way. That would be boring. This poetry is honest, powerful, and thoughtful. Also, he's very accessible for those of you who are poetry averse.
  
  Some highlights:
  -“Inanimate’s the one word / I’d execute by guillotine / to excise the lie / of lifeless, since bite into any bit of dirt / or dust and you’ve got a gob full of electrons / and quarks, the whole menagerie of matter’s / in there, pinging and swooping, steel’s got a pulse / as far as I’m concerned.”
  
  -“The word terror. I’ll bury the word terror / to be free of the word terror. / … If terror is said / seven times in a row, it loses meaning, becomes / humdrum, a mere timpani of ear. / If terror is said seven hundred / thousand million trillion times, I am being raped / by a word.”
  
  -"the dead have no ears, no answering machines / that we know of, still we call."
• 
  Jessica

  I have been putting off finishing this book, wanting to elongate the reverberation of each poem through my consciousness.
  
  I woke up at 3am, my body rattled by its hypertrophied stress responses, mind looping back and again to the two sides of a particular coin: together, separate.
  
  I read the last three poems of this book, and felt their integration. They are neither and both, everything and nothing. I cried, and it was good.
  
  
  (last lines of the collection below--do not read them, nor think of a white bear):
  
  "This is where I get self-conscious about language,
  
  words are love affairs or seances or harpoons, there isn't a sentence
  
  that isn't a plea.
  
  
  This is where I don't care that I'm half wrong when I say everything
  
  is made entirely of light.
  
  
  This is where my wife and I hold hands.
  
  Over there is where our shadows do a better job."
• 
  Keith Bryan

  The simple review is that this was a great collection of poetry. It was enchanting haunting, and interesting. A wonderful collection for those interested in poetic expression and artistic views on death and life and the living of one's life to death. I actually dog-eared the pages, which goes against everything I was ever taught about books. It will be fun to poke around it again in the future for sure.
  
  Overall: It's a great collection with a great deal of rereading potential, but I'd only give it to those willing to face the concept of death with maturity mixed with a sense of jocularity. And a well balanced mix at that.
• 
  Katelyn

  I came at this collection already heavy, wanting a good wringing out. This delivers. Man this delivers. Hicok's works are always such a strange mix of easy conversation, and the inscrutable dream-logic of symbols. This collection seems on a plane even more inscrutable than usual, as it weaves and bobs through death and other losses. Heavier fare than past collections, but losing none of its wit and whimsy. Very sweet and very alive. I keep meaning to read other poets but keep coming back to Bob.
• 
  L. A.

  His best book yet. The poems are devastating and brilliant.
  
  "In other languages
  you are beautiful — mort, muerto — I wish
  I spoke moon, I wish the bottom of the ocean
  were sitting in that chair playing cards
  and noticing how famous you are
  on my cell phone — pictures of your eyes
  guarding your nose and the fire
  you set by walking, picture of dawn
  getting up early to enthrall your skin —"
  
• 
  Amorak Huey

  "... Hicok’s new collection, Elegy Owed (Copper Canyon, 2013, 111 pp, $22), sets about that essential business of telling each other everything we can. ..."
  
  
  You can read my full review at Wake.
  
  
• 
  Erica Wright

  Sometimes I get nervous when I begin a new collection by a favorite poet, afraid of being disappointed. Elegy Owed is Hicok at his best, though. Whether tackling the personal or the political, each poem is a surprising combination of whimsy and insight.
• 
  Priscilla

  This is beautiful - one of the best books of poetry I've read in a long time, one of those books that truly makes you marvel at the possibility and music of life and language. I slowed down intentionally and rationed it to a few poems per day to savor it, and it was worth it.
• 
  Miriam Johnson

  I put birds
  in most poems and rivers, put rivers
  in most birds and thinking, put the dead
  in many sentences
  blinking quietly, put missing
  into bed with having, put wolves
  in my mouth hunting whispers, put faith
  in making, each poem a breath
  nailed to nothing.
• 
  Nicole Testa LaLiberty

  Hicok's ability to combine humor with discomfort, and with pain, and then also wrap those things in with beauty is remarkable, and very enjoyable, and often uncomfortable in the best way.
• 
  Jan Moens

  8/10
• 
  Dee

  Bob Hicok is a genius in a way you start looking at things, things you'd rather call trivial in your everyday life, differently, once you're done with his poetry.
  Short collection yet these poems and the metaphors for death were deep that you'd feel stranded in a way death actually leaves you with.
  Sad yet with a tinge of humor, that's some excellent work from Bob Hicok.
  
  Leave a message
  
  When the wind died, there was a moment of silence
  for the wind. When the maple tree died, there was always a place
  to find winter in its branches. When the roses died, I respected the privacy
  of the vase. When the shoe factory died, I stopped listening
  at the back door to the glossolalia of machines.
  When the child died, the mother put a spoon in the blender.
  When the child died, the father dug a hole in his thigh
  and got in. When my dog died, I broke up with the woods.
  When the fog lived, I went into the valley to be held by water.
  The dead have no ears, no answering machines
  that we know of, still we call.
  
  4.5 for sure!!
• 
  Nathan

  Bob Hicok is not for the faint of heart, or intellect.
  He'll stretch you, and occasionally--if you're me--
  even piss you off. There is more than one poem
  in this book that made me say out loud--
  because no one else was in the room--
  "What the hell are you doing, Bob!"
  
  That said, the number of poems
  in this book that have crazy stars
  all over the margins, and underlines
  to the point that I had to stop underlining
  because it was ruining the look and feel of the page,
  by far outweigh the ones that pissed me off. So...
  
  what can I do but tell you...
  especially if you're a poet who wants to be a better one...
  
  Yeah... you prob'ly outta read it...
• 
  Rene Saller

  I'm pretty picky about poetry, but I love Bob Hicok's stuff almost without exception. My gateway Hicok poem was "Oh My Pa-Pa," which I read in some journal somewhere, immediately becoming a fan for life. Ordinarily I read poems here and there rather than in discrete volumes (like Baby Doll, I'm a Reader of Magazines), but I decided last year that this year I would read more poetry books. This is a good one!
• 
  caramels

  "on a rock a Roman stood on and thought,
  I could conquer this, I could teach this wind
  to bow. It would be beautiful to be the wind
  saying, fat chance."
• 
  Eóin Ó Fuartháin

  Some of my favorite poems are in this book.
• 
  Klara

  Ode to magic
  
  Do the one where you bring the woman
  back from the dead, his host, the king, commanded,
  but the magician would not.
  
  He did the one in which he was one half
  of the folk-indie duo Heartwind.
  
  He did the one that required a volunteer tornado
  from the audience.
  
  He did the one in which the lungs of a warlord
  are filled with lava.
  
  But he would not bring the woman back from the dead.
  
  The king wanted to cut his head off
  but the queen said, Perhaps this is just a poem.
  
  This is just a poem.
  
  Everyone is alive as long as the poem is alive.
  
  The king wears a crown of a thousand crows.
  
  The queen keeps three lovers inside the castle
  of her dress, the third a spare for the second,
  the second a technical advisor to the first.
  
  The magician’s tongue is nothing but the word
  abracadabra and the dead woman has just written
  cotton candy on her shopping list, just written
  antelopes and reminded the poet
  he is running out of things to say.
  
  The queen asks him, Do the one in which your heart
  is folded over and pounded with moonlight,
  in which you claim to miss everything —
  I like how big your arms are in that one,
  your throat the size of the universe
  before silence gets the last word.
  
  Oh, that one, the poet says, is this one,
  is the only one.
  
  Listen to it sound like shucked corn,
  like a single blade of grass eating sun,
  like any train or noisemaker or hallelujah
  that will keep this line from being
  the last line, and this line
  but not the coming line, the hush,
  the crush it is.
  - p.24
  
  ...
  
  Blue prints
  
  Up and up, the mountain, but suddenly a flat spot
  exactly the size of the house they would build,
  and when they went to dig for the foundation, the foundation
  appeared, just as the beams for the floor, as they started
  to set them in place, revealed they had always been there,
  
  it was like coming into the room to find your diary
  writing itself, she told the interviewer, who wanted to talk
  about her paintings but she kept coming back to the house,
  including the sky above the house, how it resembled
  her childhood, forgetting how to rain
  when it wasn’t raining, remembering blue
  just when she needed to be startled most, don’t you think
  
  it odd that my life has always had just enough space
  for my life, she asked the man’s recorder
  as much as the man, hoping the recorder
  would consider the question and get back to her, then you moved
  to Madrid, the interviewer was saying, and started painting
  your invisible landscapes, I remember the first window
  
  we lifted into place, she replied, that the view of the valley
  it would hold was already in the glass when we cut the cardboard box
  away, we just lined them up, the premonition
  with the day, he had twenty more questions
  
  but crossed them off, I have always wanted to build a room
  around a painting, he said, Yes, she replied, A painting
  hanging in space, he added, A painting of a woman
  adjusting a wall to suit a painting, she said, Like how the universe
  began, he suggested, Did it begin, she wondered, is that
  what this is?
  - p.57
  
  ....
  
  The order of things
  
  Then I stopped hearing from you. Then I thought
  I was Beethoven’s cochlear implant. Then I listened
  to deafness. Then I tacked a whisper
  to the bulletin board. Then I liked dandelions
  best in their Afro stage. Then a breeze
  held their soft beauty for ransom. Then no one
  throws a Molotov cocktail better
  than a Buddhist monk. Then the abstractions
  built a tree fort. Then I stopped hearing from you.
  Then I stared at my life with the back of my head.
  Then an earthquake somewhere every day.
  Then I felt as foolish as a flip-flop
  alone on a beach. Then as a beach
  alone with a sea. Then as a sea
  repeating itself to the moon. Then I stopped hearing
  from the moon. Then I waved. Then I threw myself
  into the work of throwing myself
  as far as I can. Then I picked myself up
  and wondered how many of us
  get around this way. Then I carried
  the infinity. Then I buried the phone.
  Then the ground rang. Then I answered the ground.
  Then the dial tone of dirt. Then I sat on a boulder
  not hearing from you. Then I did jumping jacks
  not hearing from you. Then I felt up silence. Then silence
  and I went all the way.
  - p.61