W203 Response #9

It’s all really rather amazing: the synchronicities that seem to slip into a moment here, a moment there and then back to the here and now. It’s interesting to watch serendipitisness build on itself until second and third (and so on) order phenomena start to emerge. For instance, how astonishing is it that: the last poem I wrote on, being the last poem of the last section of the Tate Memoir, seems to directly correlate with the first poem now being written on from Hicok’s Animal Soul (being too the last poem, tho of the first set)? Not only are the titles and subjects the same (tho not the situations nor the forms) but to boot, Hicok’s ‘Rapture’ shows signs of Tateian influence.

            Hicok’s “blue genitals [that] look like cave paintings… only less articulate” seems to be a kind of hieroglyph reference to Tate’s “blue antelope” painting that probably would look right at home in Lascaux. As Wild Bob Hicok leaves the room he was driven to by reminders, he enters a world of “present tense,” where for a moment memory breaks through into something closer and more real; but before the bar in Sarajevo materializes too much WBH slams on the breaks, like a grand prix driver late to the realization of the upcoming hairpin turns, with an “Even though I’m not.” And we see that what’s going on is, as Jamiroquai might say: traveling without moving. As Hicok maneuvers the S-curves, breaking as he enters then accelerating through each vertex in space and time, one might be inclined to say: Golly g-force-wilikkers! What just happened?; but then the poem opens up into a straight-away of revelation, where “the events of [the poem’s] lives compress to singularity” and the barroom so far away (tho true), and the room with a love topped desk and a man of red and blue become not two but “one room” on “one night.” And as the traveler’s whispers echo through time, as if “one word” was a cork in the barrel of “all words,” the glowing bridges between raptures once again become visible in the “soul reborn [as] a hawk” and “powers of invisibility.”