Poetry 365 - Evanston Public Library

Another National Poetry Month has come and gone but that doesn’t mean the fun is over. Breathe easy, poetry friends, because here on Off the Shelf we like to celebrate year round with Poetry 365, a monthly-minus-April feature that highlights a contemporary poet’s most recent work. This month we pick back up with Bob Hicok’s absorbing new book Elegy Owed. A fluid, funny, and darkly irreverent exploration of mortality and mourning, this eighth collection from the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist offers offbeat variations on the elegy that “jut out in wild, associative directions, yet find their way back to the root of the matter, often in sincere and heartbreaking ways.” So while you reminisce about another National Poetry Month, check out this excellent new collection, sample a poem below, and make sure to stop back next month for Poetry 365.

Obituary for the middle class

This whole thing, this way of living beside a can opener

beside a microwave beside a son beside a daughter

beside a river going to college, you get up

and kiss the mortgage and go go go with coffee-veins

and burger-fries and pack your soul on ice

till sixty-five, when you sit down with a lake

and have a long talk with your breath

and cast your mind far away from shore, fish nibbling

the mosquitoes of your thoughts: they will whisper of this life

a hundred years from now to children before sleep

who will call them liars, “Once upon a time,

they had two and a half bathrooms and tiny houses

for their cars and doctors who listened

through tubes to their fat hearts, they named

their endeavors and beliefs four-wheel drive,

twenty-percent-off sale, summer vacation, colonoscopy,

variable-rate loan, inheritance,” and we will be

as gods to them in that they won’t believe in us,

and we will be spared the eternity of their worship

as they will be spared money, the counting

and the having and the memory of the middle share

of what gets harder and harder to call a pie

elegy owed

Russell J. (Readers’ Services)

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