Quotes from Bob Hicok

My heart/ is whatever temperature a heart is/ in a man who doesn't believe in heaven.

Here, when I say I never want to be without you, somewhere else I am saying I never want to be without you again. And when I touch you in each of the places we meet, in all of the lives we are, it's with hands that are dying and resurrected. When I don't touch you it's a mistake in any life, in each place and forever

I love how intimate I've become with failure.

Making it in poetry The young teller at the credit union asked why so many small checks from universities? Because I write poems I said. Why haven't I heard of you? Because I write poems I said.

i can't prove this but i can't prove you're a good person though i suspect you're a good person.

I like the idea of different theres and elsewheres, an Idaho known for bluegrass, a Bronx where people talk like violets smell. Perhaps I am somewhere patient, somehow kind, perhaps in the nook of a cousin universe I've never defiled or betrayed anyone.

Let us all be from somewhere.

Then I felt up silence. Then silence and I went all the way.

My life the only thing that has been with me my whole life

When I say my name I hear a burned-down church.

I will beg, will take to my knees, will listen to snow stroking air, a sky of gasps, will open my mouth, swallow, somewhere else the sky is falling, somewhere else it gets back up.

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.

I think clapping is how mourn.

I had no business trying to see you leave, see death arrive, I owe you an apology, an elegy, I owe you the drift of memory, the praise of everything, of saying it was the best decision of my life, to hold you full, hold you empty, & live as the only bond between the two.

When I don't touch you it's a mistake in any life, in each place and forever.

The wise will go upstairs, undo buttons and hair, fold themselves within the covenant of flesh and make love wilder than any weather. — Bob Hicok, from "Weather," The Legend of Light (The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995)

My heart is cold, it should wear a mitten. My heart is whatever temperature a heart is in a man who doesn't believe in heaven. from "Pilgrimage

When I don't touch you it's a mistake in any life, in each place and forever. — Bob Hicok from, "Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem," Plus Shipping . (BOA Editions Ltd.; 1st ed edition October 1, 1998)

I love how intimate I've become with failure.