Sincere

“I don’t know what poetry is, but a poem’s an obituary trying to be a prayer.”

^{Temple Gardens by Paul Klee (1920)}

Dear friends,

Ever since I watched Ted Lasso, and perhaps that long David Foster Wallace interview in which he calls irony the song of a bird who’s grown to love its cage, I’ve thought a lot about sincerity—how rare and difficult it is in this day and age, and how necessary. Bob Hicok’s poems remind me that sincerity doesn’t mean sentimentality. It means being honest, even when the honesty is strange, uncomfortable, funny, or bleak. I love how he can be sincere, in life and on the page, and I take a lot of inspiration from that.

Karan

Sincere

by Bob Hicok

People craved meth, now oxy. People
are fickle bastards at the product level,
though addiction itself is bankable
as horse shit. Has there ever been a culture
used that as currency? The things to learn
accumulate. Like I’ve been playing out a rope
behind me for years, knowing they did this
on ships to measure their speed, but not how.
And where does pleasure evaporate into?
I tried meth, oxy, coke, meditation, push-ups,
running beside the train and on the train
and into the train, getting shorter
as I get older and getting older
with an iris pressed to my forehead,
and still every animal in the forest
runs away from me. Some people
are a circle, some a straight line, others a mess
of squiggles, slashes, and ampersand-
looking deals that might be snow. Those are most
of the people I know. I’d have jumped
off the moon into a speeding car
with a noose around my neck
as I fired a round into my skull
decades back if I weren’t addicted
to words the way a plumber’s
addicted to water. Poetry has saved me
from everything except poetry. Sometimes
people ask me what poetry is. I tell them
I don’t know what poetry is, but a poem’s
an obituary trying to be a prayer.
Usually they smile the smile that means,
I wish I were cleaning crusty pans
instead of remembering
I just heard that sentence. In turn,
I smile the smile that means,
I apologize for being a fish on land
lost at sea, and we move forward
into the new awkwardness,
which resembles the old awkwardness,
but has that new awkwardness smell. 

This poem was first published in Kenyon Review, Volume 40, Number 6, Nov/Dec 2018.