Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Bob Hicok’s "How the Mirror Looks This Morning" is a stark, unsettling meditation on guilt, failed redemption, and the troubling coexistence of past violence with present normalcy. The poem moves between childhood memory and present reflection, drawing an implicit parallel between personal acts of harm and the randomness of destruction in the wider world. It is a poem about aftermath—about how one looks at oneself after the fact, about what the mirror reflects when the past refuses to dissolve.

The poem opens with a small but significant detail: "Probably the size of the six volt / made it seem life-giving." This suggests that the child version of the speaker, armed with wires and misplaced conviction, saw power as something proportionate—if something was big enough, it could reverse what had happened. The placement of "life-giving" at the end of the line makes it momentarily ambiguous; it could refer to the six-volt battery, but also to the child's belief that something in his hands held the power to undo death.

The next lines paint a scene of youthful tinkering, of curiosity repurposed toward something darker: "I had wires, a drawer / of red and green and black wires / in a thicket where socks belonged." The specificity of the misplaced wires—"a thicket where socks belonged"—subtly reinforces a sense of disorder, of something being fundamentally out of place. This is not just about physical storage; it is about an unsettling misalignment in the speaker’s early understanding of life and death.

Then, the full horror of the memory emerges: "I had this idea that a six volt battery / would bring the cat back to life / and cut it down from where it hung." The phrasing is deliberate—"bring the cat back to life" comes first, suggesting an almost innocent belief in reanimation before the heavier revelation: "cut it down from where it hung." The realization that the speaker was the one who put the cat there arrives with a delayed impact. Hicok structures the moment so that we experience it as the speaker does—a slow, dawning horror.

The next lines intensify the grotesque attempt at resurrection: "even when I put wires / in anus and mouth, even when I touched / the Xs of its eyes / with copper." This moment, with its visceral, clinical detail, is difficult to read. The contrast between the physicality of the cat’s body—the undeniable thingness of it—and the child's almost scientific approach to undoing its death exposes the disturbing logic of childhood curiosity mixed with cruelty. The cat's eyes are "Xs", a cartoonish image that distances the moment from its real horror, suggesting that the child speaker may not have fully comprehended the finality of death.

Then, the adult voice enters: "I can ask now / why I believed that, / or why I killed the cat / in the first place, or why can’t I travel / at the speed of sound?" The casual inclusion of "why I killed the cat" among other impossibilities—resurrection, faster-than-sound travel—suggests a lingering disconnect between the speaker and his past self. These questions are asked as if they all belong to the same category, as if the act of cruelty can be rationalized alongside childhood fantasies about science and power.

Yet, there is a turn—"The kitty / that comes around every evening for food / purrs closer and closer / to my rehabilitation." This stray cat becomes a potential symbol of redemption, of a chance to undo past harm through kindness. The phrasing—"closer and closer"—suggests an incremental process, an unfinished journey toward some form of atonement. But does feeding a cat erase killing one? The poem does not provide an answer.

The shift from personal to cosmic arrives abruptly: "God, on the other hand, / sent a train into a bus last night." The violence of the past is now placed beside the violence of the world. The phrasing is deliberate—if one believes in God, then one must reconcile a higher power with arbitrary suffering. The line challenges conventional religious thinking: if God exists, then He, too, is capable of destruction. But even if one does not believe in God, the violence remains, and it has no reason. The mention of "twenty-two dead" is almost thrown in, a statistic, a grim fact of the way the world works.

Then comes the final contradiction: "and yet I think of myself / as a happy person." This closing statement is unsettling in its ambiguity. The phrase "and yet" suggests a contradiction—how can someone with such a past, someone aware of the world’s arbitrary cruelty, claim happiness? The answer is unclear. Is this happiness a form of self-forgiveness? A willful ignorance? A rationalization? Or is it simply a recognition that people contain contradictions—that one can commit harm, witness tragedy, and still find a way to exist without constant self-flagellation?

Hicok’s "How the Mirror Looks This Morning" is an unflinching examination of guilt and the persistence of memory. The mirror, unmentioned in the body of the poem but present in the title, suggests that the past is always there, waiting to be looked at. The poem does not ask for forgiveness, nor does it offer an easy resolution. Instead, it lingers in the space between horror and normalcy, between past and present, asking the reader to sit with the uncomfortable truth that harm—whether personal or cosmic—is part of the fabric of existence, and that people, even those who have done terrible things, must somehow go on.

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