Sometimes I can see in a friend’s eyes
a typhoon has got loose in her brain
or she mine, and we play gin or Boggle
or drink gin until we’re boggled,
and once she wondered what sewing a mouse
to her tongue would taste like and twice
we kissed when we were younger the same
other woman but not at the same other time.
Our friendship is based on the realization
that neither of us knows what we’re doing
but we’re doing it at full speed, in pajamas
as often as possible, with art on the walls
of our homes and hearts, to a crescendo
of smashed dishes when necessary, all tuned
to C sharp. She’s a good egg
and no real danger to mice, the kind
of kind woman who’ll help you cheat at Scrabble
by allowing you to spell chrysanthemum
with an X and walk with you thinking
the razor blades in your blood are winning
in silence up a mountain when silence
is all the pressure you can bear. I call her often
and Erato to bug her and Sharon a lot but
only technically because that’s her name.
And why are typhoons typhoons and not hurricanes
or hurricanes typhoons or any of this easier
than it is? Reasons, I suppose, exist, though
I’ve never known them to be in season.
BOB HICOK’s Water Look Away was published by Copper Canyon Press in 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 been selected for inclusion in nine volumes of the Best American Poetry.
