Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Bob Hicok’s "Heroin" is a harrowing meditation on addiction, love, and the inevitability of loss. Told from the perspective of a brother witnessing another brother’s descent into heroin use, the poem captures the helplessness of watching someone you love surrender to self-destruction. Hicok crafts a landscape where time warps, memory and the present collapse into each other, and even the natural world—the thaw of spring, the hammering sun, the gaunt wind—mirrors the fragility of the human body. The poem does not offer resolution or redemption; instead, it presents addiction as an inescapable undertow, a force as much a part of life as the seasons themselves.

The opening lines establish a metaphor that sets the tone for the entire piece: “Imagine spring’s thaw, your brother said, each house a small rain, the eaves muttering like rivers and you the white skin the world sheds.” This image of shedding suggests renewal but also erasure—the way ice melts and disappears, how the remnants of winter dissolve into nothingness. The speaker’s brother, in linking himself to this transformation, subtly foreshadows his own fate: he, too, will be something shed, something lost in the transition between seasons. The mention of “your flesh unfolded and absorbed” evokes both an organic process and something more ominous—the dissolution of the body, the way heroin consumes and reshapes a person.

The poem then moves into a moment of shared experience: “You walked Newark together, tie loosened, a silk rainbow undone, his fatigues the flat green of summer’s end, all blood drained from the horizon.” Here, the speaker and his brother are positioned in a liminal space—between seasons, between life and addiction. The tie, undone like a rainbow unraveling, suggests something slipping, a loss of structure, while the fatigues signal past battles, survival. The line “all blood drained from the horizon” is particularly striking—it foreshadows the physical and metaphorical bleeding out of the brother, the absence of vitality.

Hicok then gestures toward what could have been a way to hold onto him: “It would have been easier had you music to discuss, a common love for one of the brutal sports.” This small moment acknowledges the importance of shared language, shared passion, in keeping connections alive. The lack of these commonalities emphasizes the gap between them, the growing chasm of addiction that cannot be bridged by conversation or casual interests.

Then comes the poem’s most gut-wrenching moment: “You almost tried it for him, cinched a belt around your arm, aimed a needle at the bloated vein.” The speaker, in a desperate attempt to understand or join his brother in his suffering, nearly steps into his world. The action is intimate, mirroring his brother’s own physical rituals, and yet it is a threshold he cannot cross. The scene is rendered in eerie stillness—“your window open to July’s gaunt wind and the radio dispersing its chatty somnolence”—the contrast between the vast, indifferent world outside and the quiet horror of what is happening inside underscores the isolation of addiction.

Then, a sudden intervention: “When he grabbed your wrist, his rightful face came back for a moment.” The word “rightful” suggests that addiction has stolen his true self, that the brother is only briefly reclaiming the person he once was. This moment of lucidity is reinforced by a memory—“he was fifteen and standing above Albert Ramos, fists clenched, telling the boy in a voice / from the Old Testament what he’d do if certain cruelties happened again.” The invocation of the Old Testament gives the brother’s past self an almost biblical sense of righteousness, as though he once wielded justice and power, standing against cruelty. But that strength is gone, replaced by the fragile act of stopping his own brother from following him into heroin’s grip.

Instead of injecting, they walk out together: “Loosening the belt, you both walked out, straight and shaking, into the hammering sun.” The detail of "straight and shaking" captures the complexity of the moment—there is a kind of victory in resisting the drug, but the tremors of withdrawal, of trauma, remain. Their conversation turns nostalgic, “talked of the past as if it were a painting of a harvested field, two men leaning against dusk and pitchforks.” This pastoral, almost mythic image contrasts with the urban decay of Newark, reinforcing the distance between who the brother was and who he has become.

But addiction does not release its hold so easily. The next scene is one of devastation: “That night he curled up and began to die, his body a pile of ants.” The dehumanization here is stark—his body is breaking down, swarmed by something smaller, relentless. The speaker, unable to help, turns to a futile act of distraction: “you on the floor ripping magazines into a mound of words and faces.” This act—tearing apart pages filled with people, narratives—mirrors the fragmentation of his brother, his own inability to make sense of what is happening. The small gesture—“touching his forehead with the back of your hand in a ritual of distress”—is one of helpless love, a primal act of checking for fever, of hoping for a sign of life.

Then, a temporary reprieve: “When in two days he was human again, when his eyes registered the scriptures of light, when he tried to stand but fell and tried again, you were proud.” The description of his recovery as “registering the scriptures of light” gives the moment a sacred quality, as though returning from near-death is a kind of resurrection. But the poem does not end here, because addiction does not end here.

The final turn is the most painful: “but immediately began counting days, began thinking his name was written in a book locked in the safe of a sunken ship, a sound belonging to water, to history, and let him go.” The image of the “book locked in the safe of a sunken ship” is devastating—his fate is sealed, beyond reach, already lost to time and distance. The transition from pride to resignation happens instantly, because the speaker understands what comes next. He does not fight it. He recognizes that addiction is not something he can pull his brother out of—it is something the brother must either survive or succumb to on his own. The last phrase—“relinquished him to the strenuous work of vanishing”—is both beautiful and horrifying. Vanishing is not passive; it is work. Addiction is an active process of disappearance, a slow erasure that requires effort, that demands surrender.

Hicok’s "Heroin" is not just a poem about addiction—it is about love’s limitations, about the excruciating act of watching someone dissolve and knowing there is nothing you can do to stop it. The poem moves in waves, like relapse and recovery, moments of hope followed by inevitable decline. It captures the loneliness of the addict and the loneliness of the witness, both trapped in cycles that neither can fully break. The final surrender—to let him go, to acknowledge his vanishing as something beyond control—is perhaps the most unbearable part of all.

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