Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Bob Hicok’s "Waiting for UPS" is a meditation on time, loss, and the struggle to hold onto the past, framed through the mundane yet strangely existential act of waiting for a package delivery. As with much of Hicok’s work, the poem operates on multiple levels—balancing humor with deep melancholy, the trivial with the profound, and the immediate with the distant. The poem’s structure, with its broken lines and scattered spacing, visually mimics the fragmented nature of thought, hesitation, and longing.

The speaker begins with an admission of confinement: "Now I live inside the / window." This line transforms waiting into an act of existence, as if the speaker has become absorbed by the very frame through which he watches. The phrase suggests both physical presence (waiting by the window for UPS) and psychological limbo—a self-imposed exile where anticipation dictates experience. He then turns his gaze outward, but the world appears diseased: "Now I think the / sky / doesn’t have enough sky today and that all / the trees have cancer and / are whispering / their little coughs to the / earth." The speaker perceives depletion everywhere—an inadequate sky, sickly trees—though he admits he does not actually hear their suffering because his attention is occupied elsewhere. This disconnect between perception and engagement reflects the central theme of the poem: the difficulty of truly being present, of distinguishing between what is happening now and what has already slipped into memory.

The speaker’s focus shifts to the packages, which are "destined for Pittsburgh." The detail of Pittsburgh is important—not just a random destination, but a place with personal weight. The boxes are not merely objects being shipped; they contain something meaningful. Yet their delivery is uncertain, dictated by the vagueness of corporate logistics: "The woman from UPS said / they’d be here / sometime between eight and / five." This phrase is presented as absurd, a broad and meaningless window of time that mirrors the absurdity of waiting for something inevitable yet unpredictable—whether it be a package, a revelation, or even death. The speaker compares this waiting to the randomness of life’s choices, whether mundane ("a matching rake / and pitchfork") or violent ("hollow-point bullets / and nightscope"), evoking the unpredictability of human impulse.

Hicok then deepens the existential tone: "I’m not / good at waiting / which means I’m not good / at being alive." This is a powerful admission—linking patience with the ability to endure life itself. The speaker lacks the kind of faith that would allow him to believe in lasting love or even the permanence of happiness: "I’m not strong enough to / believe there must / eventually be a kiss on my / spine at midnight / that lasts 47 years." The specificity of “47 years” makes the longing tangible, but the speaker dismisses such sustained devotion as an impossible fantasy. Likewise, he doubts his ability to find wisdom in nature: "I’m not wise enough / to hear anything the ocean / has said to me / after worshiping it for / days except go away." The speaker presents himself as someone who seeks meaning but ultimately receives nothing in return—a failed mystic, unable to translate the messages of the world into something usable.

Then, the significance of the packages is revealed: "Gladly I would were it not / for these boxes / and the books in the boxes / and the letters / between the pages of the / books / written by my father to my / mother when neither / was dead and therefore / suffering / from irretrievable / penmanship." The books and letters represent a personal history, one that is tangible yet slipping away. The phrase “when neither / was dead” is devastating in its simplicity, underlining how death renders handwriting—once a direct, personal extension of self—into something frozen, unable to be corrected, expanded, or continued. The letters are no longer simply words but relics of presence, the remnants of a voice that can no longer speak.

The speaker’s sister, waiting in Pittsburgh, has a different desire for these letters: "She wants to open / the boxes and let the / words / on the letters molt in her / hands and turn / into the voices of our / parents / calling us in from a sky / turning dark / as a stone’s appetite." The act of molting suggests transformation—she wants these words to become voices, to reclaim the past by bringing their parents' presence back into the present. The darkening sky becomes a metaphor for the encroachment of loss, an image of inevitable forgetting or distance.

The poem reaches its most poignant moment when the speaker imagines his sister standing on her porch, "where strangers practice / their hobby / of diving into what they / believe is the river’s / silence." This image—of people jumping into water, expecting peace but encountering something unknown—parallels the act of confronting grief. Like the jumpers, the speaker and his sister are diving into their parents' past, uncertain of what they will find.

The final lines return to the moment of waiting, but with heightened emotional weight: "If the / carrier / ever arrives in her dirt / uniform and bearing the / little / computer that will eat my / signature / and feed it to a larger / computer that hopes one / day to own / all our names." The transaction—seemingly insignificant—is now rendered eerie and symbolic. The delivery woman becomes an agent of a larger system, one that absorbs personal history into faceless data. The speaker, aware of the absurdity, still insists on a small act of defiance, or perhaps reverence: "I’ll tell / her I’ve thought / from eight to five about / why / everything I’ve concluded / thus far / concerning loss is merely / a prelude / to a greater confusion." He acknowledges that everything he believes about grief is only a first step toward deeper, more profound uncertainty. Loss, in this sense, is never complete—it expands, grows more complex.

The closing image—"This won’t seem / nearly as strange as my / insistence / she let me kiss each box / good-bye."—is both humorous and deeply moving. The act of kissing the boxes, absurd in a practical sense, is a gesture of longing, of farewell. It humanizes the inanimate, recognizing that objects—books, letters, even packages—hold the weight of love and memory.

Hicok’s "Waiting for UPS" transforms a simple, frustrating everyday experience into an exploration of time, memory, and grief. The mundane act of shipping books becomes an act of preservation, an attempt to keep the past from vanishing. The poem captures the ache of waiting—not just for a package, but for understanding, for closure, for some resolution to the endless, ongoing nature of loss.

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