Red Rover Red Rover - Bob Hicok

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fire from water and stones,

      when actually I can start a fire

      from anything, even an avalanche,

      especially a tornado, though most of all

      nothing at all.

      Yes this again

      How goes prosecuting Nazis? The OGs,

      not the new ones. I can ask a friend that

      of his daughter. You probably can’t

      so I’ll ask for you, too. It’s a great world

      that offers these little comforts

      for its mistakes, that takes a degree from Harvard

      and turns it into remembering lives

      only photos1 recall, not their details

      but their worth. He’s proud of her

      and I’m proud of us. We could say, So what? And do

      about so much. But not this: we agree genocide

      needs to be snuffed out. Mostly.

      Though studies show kids don’t know

      what Auschwitz is, was. That flies

      are still easily separated from their wings.

      That we are us. No amount of law or dreaming

      changes that. Maybe some amount of love.

      1. Grainy, fading, black & white: memory trying to forget itself.

      A lament, pep talk, and challenge walk into a bar

      Banjo. Zither. Carnegie Hall. The Four Tops and Seasons.

      Greek chorus. Music of the spheres and triangles

      and dodecahedrons. The Kinks. The Mozarts

      and Fats Wallers and Puentes. The Butthole Surfers.

      My office is bigger and more flexible than my heart

      and this is a weird way to critique my affections

      but so be it: the intervention is under way. Do you feel

      small? I feel tiny lately. Like a good person

      would remove the doors of his house and give the poor

      a controlling interest in JPMorgan and storm congress

      with onesies and pillows and hold that flotilla of egos

      hostage in a sleepover until the Kindness Act is passed

      unanimously and do unto others goes from words

      dropped in the suggestion box to law. Why aspire

      to the part of a thimble when galaxies

      are shinier role models? I should be putting meals

      on wheels or moving Miami to a higher elevation

      or helping strangers with their calculus homework.

      I speak shovel, yammer hammer, have drills and bits,

      wrenches and jigs, elbows and frontal lobes, and have noticed

      when I throw up my hands in frustration

      they come back, that they take their responsibilities

      to hold and carry seriously, and so should I

      be a ladle or hammock, spoon or cradle, a yodel

      or some other reaching across the distance

      to the factions and splinter groups of the tribe

      or clan of woman and man. It’s no accident I began

      this meandering with music: no two species

      could come from more distant planets

      than a Steinway and sax,

      yet listen to how well they get along

      when they put their mouths where our fears are,

      when they lend us our better-tuned selves. My ears

      were raised by Ray Charles and Johnny Cash, so I hum

      and flow and stumble, rasp and trance and moan

      between two sets of certainties, that we are angelic

      junkies, fallen and blind, and that we can rise

      and see. The deepest soundtrack of my being

      is a black man and the Man in Black

      breathing into me the one and only commandment:

      Don’t just have but be a soul.

      Interlude

      In the little swale where my wife sleeps

      to my right, I grow roses

      whenever she goes away

      for the weekend to see her family.

      A place for everything

      and everything glowing

      on the inside if you close your eyes

      and look. How old will I be

      when I die? Zero: a babe in the arms

      of the afterlife. How old will I be

      when I figure out how to stand

      unobtrusively among the junipers

      growing taller and more resilient

      in the night? She comes home,

      sees the roses and knows

      I’ve been up all night

      watering our life,

      caretaker of the presence

      of her absence. Hello

      my deepest breath. Hello

      falling through space

      from our little while together

      standing still.

      Under construction

      I meant to be taller,

      I tell my tailor, who tells my teller,

      who cashes my check all in ones

      to suit the height of my ambition.

      And kinder, I tell my trainer,

      who trains my tailor and my teller too

      to look better wetter and drier, kinder

      to people and blue skies, moles

      and Republicans, even though

      it takes more muscles to smile

      than tell someone to fuck off.

      I ask my tuner to listen to my head

      and tell me whether it sounds out of sorts;

      she says a man’s not a piano

      and cries, for wouldn’t that be nice,

      a man you can sit in front of

      and play like Satie turning a piano

      into a river speaking to its mother,

      the rain, late at night. But she’s sweet,

      my tuner, and tightens a few strings

      in my back just to get the old tinka-tinka

      up to snuff before she kisses me

      on the cheek. Life. I think that’s

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