Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Bob Hicok’s "Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem" is a meditation on time, parallel existences, and the fragility of love. The poem moves fluidly between philosophical musings, scientific allusions, and deeply personal confessions, crafting a love poem that resists sentimentality while still embracing longing. Hicok’s speaker wrestles with impermanence, not just of the body but of relationships, and suggests that love, if it is to survive, must be understood not only within the confines of the present but across multiple dimensions of being.

The poem begins with an unusual prediction: “My left hand will live longer than my right. The rivers / of my palms tell me so.” The idea that hands—parts of the same body—will have different lifespans immediately introduces a theme of disparity and uncertainty. The rivers of the speaker’s palms evoke both the natural world and the practice of palmistry, suggesting that fate is written into the body but remains beyond control. The warning that follows—“Never argue with rivers. Never expect your lives to finish / at the same time.”—extends this uncertainty to relationships. The plural “lives” is telling; it suggests that individuals do not exist as singular entities but as multiple, evolving selves. This foreshadows the poem’s exploration of alternate realities, where different versions of the speaker may exist with different outcomes.

The next lines introduce an associative leap: “I think / praying, I think clapping is how hands mourn.” This insight is characteristic of Hicok’s style—startling in its simplicity yet profound in its implications. Clapping and praying are gestures of sound and silence, celebration and supplication, suggesting that hands, like people, express grief in contradictory ways. The speaker continues this pattern of speculative thinking: “I think / staying up and waiting / for paintings to sigh is science.” Here, scientific inquiry is linked to a kind of faith, as if observation alone might reveal an unseen world. The phrase “waiting for paintings to sigh” anthropomorphizes art, implying that objects, like people, carry unspoken sorrow. This moment sets the stage for the poem’s later exploration of time, suggesting that everything—paintings, people, even hands—exists in a state of potential mourning.

Hicok then shifts into a speculative realm: “In another dimension this / is exactly what’s happening, / it’s what they write grants about: the chromodynamics / of mournful Whistlers, / the audible sorrow and beta decay of Old Battersea Bridge.” This passage playfully mixes physics with aesthetics. Chromodynamics, a term from quantum mechanics, governs the behavior of quarks, but here it applies to the mournful Whistlers—a reference to the American-born painter James McNeill Whistler. The beta decay of Old Battersea Bridge suggests that art itself experiences entropy, that sorrow is a measurable force. The humor in “it’s what they write grants about” mocks both the scientific impulse to quantify emotion and the academic tendency to turn human experience into research.

The next lines broaden the poem’s scope: “I like the idea of different / theres and elsewheres, an Idaho known for bluegrass, / a Bronx where people talk / like violets smell.” This is Hicok at his most playful—imagining alternate versions of reality where geography, music, and even language shift into unexpected combinations. The idea of “theres and elsewheres” reinforces the notion that the speaker exists not in one fixed state but across multiple versions of himself. The gentle synesthesia of “a Bronx where people talk / like violets smell”—mixing sound with scent—suggests a world in which expression is inherently poetic.

The poem then takes a more introspective turn: “Perhaps I am somewhere patient, somehow / kind, perhaps in the nook / of a cousin universe I’ve never defiled or betrayed / anyone.” This passage is quietly devastating. The speaker imagines a version of himself free from regret, implying that in this current reality, he is neither patient nor kind, that he carries guilt for betrayals unnamed. The phrase “cousin universe” suggests proximity, as if these better versions of himself are close yet unreachable.

The shift back to the body is abrupt and intimate: “Here I have / two hands and they are vanishing, the hollow of your back / to rest my cheek against, / your voice and little else but my assiduous fear to cherish.” The speaker’s hands, once described as outliving each other, are now “vanishing”, reinforcing the theme of impermanence. The phrase “assiduous fear to cherish” encapsulates the poem’s central anxiety—love is present, but so is the fear of losing it. The paradox is that to cherish something is to acknowledge its fragility.

The next lines return to the metaphor of hands: “My hands are webbed / like the wind-torn work of a spider, like they squeezed / something in the womb / but couldn’t hang on.” The imagery of webbing suggests both connection and entrapment—his hands have held something essential but have not been able to keep it. The suggestion of fetal memory, of “squeezing something in the womb”, introduces a primal longing, a sense of loss that predates conscious experience.

The poem then makes its final leap—into the multiverse of love: “Here, when I say I never want to be without you, / somewhere else I am saying / I never want to be without you again.” This moment is breathtaking in its simplicity. The idea that love is both a promise and a reunion, that somewhere in another life the speaker is returning rather than simply holding on, reframes love as something that transcends time.

The closing lines reinforce this continuity: “And when I touch you / in each of the places we meet, / in all of the lives we are, it’s with hands that are dying / and resurrected.” Love, like the speaker’s hands, is both perishable and enduring. The idea of touching across lives suggests that love is not confined to the present—that every moment of connection echoes across dimensions.

The final assertion is one of both desperation and certainty: “When I don’t touch you it’s a mistake in any life, / in each place and forever.” This is the poem’s ultimate truth—absence is always an error. The love expressed here is not just romantic but metaphysical; it defies space and time. In this world and in all others, love must be acted upon, or something essential is lost.

Hicok’s "Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem" is an extraordinary meditation on love as an act that transcends singular experience. The poem resists traditional sentimentality by grounding its longing in science, alternate realities, and existential uncertainty. Love is not presented as easy or guaranteed but as something that must be recognized, touched, and spoken into being across every possible version of existence. In the end, the poem argues that love is not just a moment but a force—a thread that binds together every life we might live.

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