Calling Him Back from Layoff

by Bob Hicok

I called a man today. After he said hello and I said hello came a pause during which it would have been   confusing to say hello again so I said how are you doing and guess what, he said fine and wondered aloud how I was   and it turns out I’m OK. He was on the couch watching cars painted with ads for Budweiser follow cars   painted with ads for Tide around an oval that’s a metaphor for life because most of us run out of gas and settle   for getting drunk in the stands and shouting at someone in a t-shirt we want kraut on our dog. I said   he could have his job back and during the pause that followed his whiskers scrubbed the mouthpiece clean   and his breath passed in and out in the tidal fashion popular with mammals until he broke through   with the words how soon thank you ohmyGod which crossed his lips and drove through the wires on the backs of ions   as one long word as one hard prayer of relief meant to be heard by the sky. When he began to cry I tried   with the shape of my silence to say I understood but each confession of fear and poverty was more awkward   than what you learn in the shower. After he hung up I went outside and sat with one hand in the bower of the other   and thought if I turn my head to the left it changes the song of the oriole and if I give a job to one stomach other   forks are naked and if tonight a steak sizzles in his kitchen do the seven other people staring at their phones   hear?

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From Insomnia Diary, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004. BOB HICOK’s poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, and numerous volumes of The Best American Poetry. His awards include the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry and a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts. Hicok has said, “What I’m most consistently doing is trying to understand why something is on my mind.… Maybe writing is nothing more than an inquiry into presences.”