Bob Hicok - Welcome Home
In the basement. An extension cord. Passed through a hole. He'd bored. In a joist. Which means she. Knew. That no pipe would. Hold. Under or technically. Above her. Weight. The beauty. Of the noose. Suggested she had. Googled "how to hang. Oneself with. An extension. Cord." Perfect. Holding his wife. Up by bear-hugging her. Calves, he listened for. Breath for. Ten minutes. To this night he dreams. That in-. Rush of. Air. Surpised it. Wasn't him and. Jealous she got. There first.
Yikes. That piece is a punch in the gut. It appears in the perfect collection titled Water Look Away by Bob Hicok. The book follows a narrative about a married couple, both of whom seemingly suffer from depression, dealing with life and infidelities. The first piece of the collection is the one above and lets us know how their relationship will ultimately conclude.
The use of periods provides an anxious tone to the poem, forcing the reader to choke out words as if speaking through a panic attack or heavy sob. The full stops provide the second benefit of allowing the severed sentences to carry a meaning separate from the larger body of the line.
To this point, the first three lines are just laying down the setting. The first truly isolated word is “knew” which forces us to pause on a close reading and wonder why the speaker needed to emphasize her knowledge of what exactly. We don’t know yet. More on that as the poem unfolds. Our next isolated word is “hold” which is exactly what we do when we reach it. This is an instruction as much as it is a part of the larger idea. We pause a moment and we begin to understand what is happening. Dread starts to leak in through the pauses in the piece.
The inclusion of “technically” is the first moment that we are shifted from the potential sorrow of the speaker. Having the sense of mind to insert a technicality implies a certain level of distance from the emotion of an event. There are different kinds of sorrow — the sorrow of the unexpected, which is chaotic and unreasoned. The sorrow of the undesired is wholly separate in that we have had time to consider it fully and instead feel the heartbreak of seeing something terrible come to fruition. This sorrow contains a certain distance resultant of our knowledge. Not only does the speaker’s subject know something, but the reader learns of the speaker’s knowledge that this might happen.
Again, an isolated instruction but this time through the homophone “weight.” It is a reminder to slow down and consider every sentence for what it is really saying. “The beauty” following a direct reference to her body seems to imply that he is referring to the beauty of this woman, but the very next line romanticizes the noose. Our thoughts are confirmed. This is a suicide. But our speaker is using some fucking disturbing language to describe the tool used, exposing a bit of his psyche in the process.
The repetition of “extension cord” with the newly inserted stop between the words forces us to revisit the beginning and compare the pacing. The stops are made less sensical (and have been for a while), implying the speaker’s anxiety is increasing. Again, we are treated to a strange word to be found in a poem about suicide: “perfect.” The noose, the means of her death, was perfect, not her death itself.
As if to address the potential misinterpretation a reader might have about the speaker’s feelings, the next amputated sentence carries some love. “Holding his wife.” We now know the relationship and the pathos of the moment — he could have grabbed her. Also, note that he speaks of her as if she is still there. He is holding his wife as opposed to her body. The next line doubles down on this idea while also letting us know that she is gone: “Up by/ bear-hugging her. Calves, he/ listened for. Breath for. Ten/ minutes.” He held her for ten minutes, head placed against her chest. This scene is both beautiful and haunting for the lack of description of his state. If you imagine this moment closely - his holding her for ten minutes and quietly listening for a breath while she is still attached to the joist, it is heartbreaking and morbid.
The poem closes with a turn, “jealous she got./ There first,” forcing us to reexamine some earlier details. Why did he bore the hole in the joist? Was that what she knew? And now his confidence that a pipe couldn’t hold makes sense, along with his admiration of the noose. His love for her and sadness for her actions are clear through his dreams in which she takes a breath, but they are stained with his suicidal ideations, but at no point in the poem is a physical embodiment of his grief described. Jay-Z once said “I can’t see it coming down my eyes,/ so I gotta make the song cry” and that is exactly what Hicok did with this form. Because of his envy, the speaker can’t physically express sorrow so the poem does it for him.