Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Bob Hicok’s "My Walk" is a meditative and atmospheric poem that transforms a simple winter walk into an exploration of language, memory, violence, and the slipperiness of time. Through a quiet yet layered narration, Hicok moves between observations of the physical world and deeper existential reflections, linking the act of walking with the mind’s movement through history, mortality, and wonder. The poem’s structure mimics the wandering nature of thought—meandering yet intentional, filled with unexpected turns that reveal profound truths hidden in the ordinary.

The poem opens with an attention to language: “February today. The first r in February / is silent in my country. Some of us / also say orn juice for orange juice.” Right away, the speaker foregrounds how sound and meaning shift depending on place and custom. This is not just a linguistic observation but a subtle way of introducing the idea that perception—whether of words, of time, of history—is fluid. The mention of “orn juice” adds a touch of humor, suggesting that even something as seemingly stable as speech is constantly being reshaped by habit and ease.

This focus on sound continues: “Last night’s snow makes whispers / of my feet.” The image is delicate, rendering the physical experience of walking through fresh snow as something hushed and secretive. There is a reverence here, a sense that winter has transformed the world into something quieter, more contemplative. The next line—“There’s no window / in the custard thick clouds”—shifts to a more enclosed image, where the sky itself has become dense and opaque, eliminating the possibility of looking beyond the immediate.

Hicok then turns toward an inversion of space: “If I / could hang maples from the sky, up / would equal down.” This line gestures toward an altered perspective, an acknowledgment that our orientation in the world is contingent and arbitrary. The phrasing “up would equal down” evokes both a childlike imagination and a more metaphysical consideration of balance and inversion—how easily things could be other than they are.

Then comes one of the poem’s most haunting images: “It feels / like I’m walking inside a prayer, / between the folded hands of Earth / and dream.” The spiritual undertones are clear, but they are grounded in something tactile—the idea of the Earth as folded hands suggests both protection and entrapment, a space where reality and dreams press against one another. The speaker is not just in nature but within something larger, something resembling a quiet plea or meditation.

This moment of reverence is disrupted by an eerie discovery: “Someone’s / been decapitating snow men / and women and children. The heads / are carefully removed and placed / at what would be the feet / of their circular souls.” The violence is chilling, but also strangely meticulous—whoever has done this has taken care in arranging the dismembered figures. The phrase “circular souls” gives these snow people an almost ghostly permanence, as if they carry something beyond their physical form. Hicok then makes a striking historical leap: “I pass a dozen of these reminders / of the French Revolution. How often / the idea of freedom is the practice / of death.” This connection reframes the decapitated snow figures as symbols of political violence, of the brutal realities that often accompany movements for liberty. The notion that freedom is often pursued through execution is an unsettling paradox, one that haunts the speaker as he moves forward.

The poem then shifts into a different kind of time, one measured not in historical events but in the slow, imperceptible movement of nature: “I enter the woods / beside other footprints, boot and paw. / Time here is the sense after years / that a stone has got up and moved.” This is one of Hicok’s most strikingly quiet metaphors—time in the woods does not pass in hours or days, but in the gradual, almost unnoticed shifts of the landscape. The movement of a stone, which might take centuries, becomes the measure of existence here.

Then, a strange encounter: “But what kind of clock is a mosquito / in winter?” This question introduces a moment of surrealism—the presence of a mosquito, an insect associated with heat and summer, in the middle of the cold. The speaker’s interaction with it is both tender and detached: “I scoop it / on my finger. It doesn’t move, has / no sense it rests on a meal of blood.” The mosquito, oblivious to the potential feast beneath it, embodies a kind of misplacement, a reminder that even natural cycles can be disrupted. The speaker breathes on it, reviving it momentarily, but it “sputters away, drops”. There is no triumph here, just another small moment of life continuing, then faltering.

The speaker wonders: “Is this the world having a dream? / Would this day not survive / without a fantasy of summer?” These lines ask whether time itself needs its opposite to function—whether winter must contain a trace of summer, whether the present moment is always shaped by something outside of itself.

Then, in a move typical of Hicok’s style, the poem leaps into the future: “I’ll forget this visitation / for months or years.” The speaker acknowledges that, despite its strangeness, this moment will slip away from conscious memory. Yet, he also predicts how it will return: “A little drunk, / I won’t know how to attach words / to my feeling that I’m lucky / there are stars.” This shift from the mosquito to the stars is vast, yet emotionally seamless. The speaker foresees a moment when he will struggle to articulate wonder, when the enormity of existence will feel both astonishing and inexpressible.

And then, the final return to the present: “I am cold now and back at my door. / As it opens, it sounds like my house / draws a breath to speak.” The poem ends with a subtle personification of the house—after all the wandering, the meditations on history, language, and time, the simple act of opening a door becomes a moment of transition, as if the house itself has been waiting to exhale. This breath, though silent, suggests both relief and anticipation, an entry back into warmth and familiarity after the strange, contemplative journey of the walk.

Hicok’s "My Walk" is, on the surface, a meditation on a snowy landscape, but beneath it lies a profound reflection on time, history, and perception. The poem moves fluidly between the minute and the vast, the immediate and the historical, the linguistic and the ineffable. It captures the way a simple walk can become an existential journey—where the world, in all its quiet oddness, whispers reminders of impermanence, violence, and wonder.

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