Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Bob Hicok’s "Bottom of the Ocean" is a meditation on mental illness, loss, and the difficulty of truly understanding another person’s suffering. The poem blends surreal humor with profound sadness, offering a portrait of a roommate whose struggle with mental illness is at once tragic, absurd, and deeply affecting. Hicok’s characteristic blend of poetic fragmentation, philosophical allusion, and conversational tone creates an atmosphere where the boundaries between perception, memory, and reality blur.

The opening line is both darkly humorous and deeply telling: "At least once you should live with someone more medicated than yourself." This sets the stage for an exploration of mental illness from the perspective of someone on the outside—someone close enough to witness it but unable to fully inhabit the experience. The phrase suggests that encountering severe mental illness firsthand is an education, an experience that alters one’s understanding of reality and suffering.

The roommate is immediately described in ways that make him seem ethereal, disconnected: "A tall man, he closed his eyes before he spoke, stocked groceries at night and heard voices." His nocturnal job and auditory hallucinations place him at a remove from conventional reality. The detail of him closing his eyes before speaking suggests an internalized world, as if he must retreat inward before engaging with others.

The poem’s first surreal moment arrives in the form of his cryptic statement during breakfast: "He said that she said we’re all out of evers." The lack of explanation—who she is, what evers are, how many they had—creates a sense of eerie detachment. The speaker is unnerved: "I slept with an extra blanket that night." This understated reaction underscores the unease of living with someone whose perception of the world is so vastly different.

The next section weaves in philosophy, bringing Plato and Kierkegaard into the roommate’s unraveling mind. The speaker recalls: "Each circle’s the bastard child of a perfect O I remember he said." This reference to Plato’s theory of forms—where everything in the physical world is an imperfect version of an ideal form—suggests that the roommate is struggling with his own imperfection, his inability to align with an ideal self. The mention of Kierkegaard—"the self is a relation which relates itself to its own self"—is an apt reflection of the roommate’s fractured sense of identity. The image of "standing so long before carnival mirrors" reinforces this distortion, suggesting that he has spent too much time grappling with his own reflection, his own doubling and fragmentation.

Then comes a shift—the moment when the roommate thinks he is better: "He thought he was better and flushed his pills." The consequences of this decision unfold quickly, leading to his return to a psychiatric institution: "Soon he was back where windows are mesh and what’s sharp is banished and what can be thrown is attached." The institutional setting is described in terms of safety measures—everything that could be dangerous is secured. This detached, clinical language contrasts with the earlier surrealism, reinforcing the stark reality of what happens when mental illness is left untreated.

A year later, the two men meet again for lunch. But while the speaker is eating normally, the roommate remains trapped in another kind of existence: "Or he spun the creamer and wore skin made of glass while I ate a sandwich and by that I mean I was hungry and he was sealed in amber." The phrase "wore skin made of glass" suggests extreme fragility, as if he is transparent, breakable, and utterly vulnerable. The idea of him being "sealed in amber" evokes an image of suspended animation—he is preserved, frozen in time by medication, unable to fully engage with the world.

The speaker has been carrying a question for years: "I’d wanted to know all that time what happened to our evers." This simple yet haunting phrase underscores the speaker’s attempt to connect—to understand if his roommate remembers what he once said and what it meant. But more than that, the speaker has come to see the roommate’s statement as prophetic: "Explain to him he was an oracle that day." The phrase "we’re all out of evers" has taken on a lasting significance, becoming a personal mantra that has shaped the speaker’s own struggle to keep going: "The phrase had stayed in my life as a command to survive myself." This is the moment of realization: the roommate’s detached, enigmatic remark, uttered in a moment of delusion, has become something deeply meaningful to the speaker. What once seemed nonsensical has transformed into a kind of wisdom—a cryptic but powerful reminder of the importance of endurance.

The poem’s final revelation is encapsulated in the line: "That was the day I learned you can sit with someone who’s on the bottom of the ocean and not get wet." This is the central metaphor of the poem—the roommate exists in a different reality, submerged in a deep and distant place where the speaker can never fully reach him. The phrase suggests the limits of empathy; no matter how much the speaker might try to understand or feel what his roommate feels, he remains separate, dry, untouched by the full weight of the other’s suffering.

The closing image is haunting: "By the time he said things were good he’d poured twelve sugars into a coffee he never touched." The excessive sugar symbolizes a futile attempt at sweetness, at normalcy, while the untouched coffee suggests detachment—his words say he is fine, but his actions betray his disconnection. The gap between appearance and reality, between words and meaning, remains unresolved.

Hicok’s "Bottom of the Ocean" is a deeply moving meditation on the experience of witnessing mental illness from the outside. The poem captures the surreal, often unsettling nature of psychosis, the way cryptic phrases can become profound, and the ultimate impossibility of fully inhabiting another’s suffering. The speaker’s realization that he can sit beside someone who is drowning without getting wet encapsulates both the sorrow and necessity of distance—how we can care for others, remember them, but never truly join them in the depths.

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