The Absence makes the heart. That’s it: absence makes the heart.

During the storm, I would like to be the storm.

^{Gwen John, A Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris, c. 1907-09. Sheffield Museums Trust}

Dear Readers,

Please apologize this absence. I’ve been preoccupied with an overloaded semester, Shannan’s divorce from her ex, our daughter Ana who is wonderfully a handful, and ONLY POEMS.

Bob has many poems about absences and here’s one. I love how this poem embraces darkness and despair as it tries to overcome them.

May we learn to fill our absences with joy,

Karan

The Absence makes the heart. That’s it: absence makes the heart.

by Bob Hicok

Waving hello versus waving goodbye
is an interpretative act. We could make it
directional: from left to right is hello,
right to left, goodbye. The buoy

clanged all night so my sleep
would know where to go. I could pray.
Tambourine myself to death.
Electroshock the worms. Wrap the maple
in tinfoil and decry the lightning
that splits it as misguided and deceived.
Nothing I do will bring you back. So this

is freedom: being ineffectual. Here
is where spiders set up shop
during the night, here is where a crow
decided to perch. Then it gets up
and perches over there, beside
where another crow perched last week.
It would be peaceful to be a sail

except during the storm.
During the storm, I would like to be
the storm. If you're the storm,
there's nothing frightening
about the storm except when it stops,
then you're dead and the maps
are drowned. Within my heart

is another heart, within that heart,
a man at war writes home:
this is like digging a hole in the rain.

This is from Bob Hicok’s Elegy Owed (Copper Canyon Press 2013), which was the first collection I read of Bob’s and is still my most favorite collection of all time.

Buy Bob Hicok’s Elegy Owed!