Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Bob Hicok’s “Shopping at the Ocean” is a meditation on the small devastations of daily life, the quiet erosions of time, and the futility of trying to hold on to what inevitably slips away. The poem moves fluidly between mundane moments—shopping, driving, casual conversation—and deeply personal grief, its structure mirroring the way emotions surface unexpectedly in the middle of ordinary routines. Hicok’s signature blend of humor, tenderness, and existential weight is present throughout, with a speaker who is both self-aware and helpless in the face of loss. The poem grapples with the inadequacy of comfort, the limits of human agency, and the ultimate realization that nothing, not even love, can keep entropy at bay.

The poem opens with a small, seemingly inconsequential incident: “Trying to save the bug she killed the bug”—a paradox that sets the stage for the poem’s larger meditation on effort and failure. The moment contains an implicit lesson about unintended consequences, but the speaker refuses to articulate it explicitly, insisting, “I won’t call you dumb ass by saying there’s a lesson in this.” This informal, self-deprecating voice establishes the speaker as someone wary of easy wisdom, someone who recognizes the limits of platitudes. Instead, the focus shifts to a smear—the evidence of the bug’s death—and then outward to the broader scene: a car ride, familiar music, and the routine act of going out to buy something.

The transition from the bug’s death to the act of shopping is seamless but loaded with meaning. The phrase “always we are buying something” suggests a quiet dissatisfaction, an awareness of the way consumption fills space but not necessarily need. The speaker reflects on his own lack of utility: “I haven’t made anything useful since I filled construction paper with a red sky and green sun and then unrolled my body into a nap.” This childhood memory is both whimsical and telling—it captures the contrast between pure, imaginative creation and the practical demands of adulthood. In a world where everything is for sale, where moments of art and rest are distant memories, the speaker feels like he contributes little of tangible value.

The poem shifts when the speaker observes his companion talking about her grandfather. The intimacy of the moment is in the details—“fortunately I watched her lips form sounds”—suggesting that meaning is as much in the physical articulation as in the words themselves. He notices a “quaver hidden by the folds of the sounds”—the tremor of suppressed grief that her voice tries to disguise. She wants to help her grandfather with “food and air and the suddenly spidery nature of sheets”—a phrase that conveys, with unsettling precision, the way old age turns even the most basic acts of living into struggles. The poem captures the quiet devastation of watching a loved one slip away, reduced to forgetting the difference between a quarter and a dime, offering his palm like “silver waters” for someone else to sort through.

The speaker refuses to offer sentimental or reductive metaphors—“I won’t call you idiot by saying emotions are like plate tectonics”—but at the same time, he acknowledges the unshakable forces at play. His companion, despite knowing she cannot change the outcome, “fastens on with greatest devotion.” The poem does not offer false hope; “Now and then someone will live forever but otherwise the trajectories are fixed.” This blunt acknowledgment of mortality serves as a counterpoint to her desire to help, to intervene, to hold things together. Even the bug she tried to save had only “seven hours to live before a bat scooped up another pinging meal.” There is no winning against time, no stopping the inevitable.

The poem’s tone shifts again as the speaker confronts his own inadequacy in providing comfort. “There’s no possible segue to the romance we’d intended our lives to contain.” This line exposes a gulf between expectation and reality. Love, in its idealized form, is supposed to be grand, transformative, full of passion and certainty. But here, love exists in the small, fumbling gestures: “hand on the thigh, kiss on the cheek,” the speaker’s repeated “uh-huh” that helps her talk through her exhaustion. He recognizes how little these actions actually do, how inadequate words and gestures are in the face of real grief.

Yet, even as he acknowledges his limitations, the speaker’s imagination leaps toward a fantastical vision of true comfort: “For her I’d be a poison eater, my mouth divine, I’d suck the sorrow out and spit its thrashing body from the window.” This wish—to physically extract pain, to make it something tangible that can be expelled—reveals both the depth of his love and the impossibility of its fulfillment. In this imagined world, suffering is reversible. “There, her grandfather would live forever, there, her friend’s father would rip the cancer from his chest and weave it into a basket.” The surreal imagery suggests a deep longing to make grief something manageable, something that can be repurposed rather than endured.

The final vision expands outward, embracing an impossible world where “money turns to swallowtails” and “the moon split into seven moons so there’s always one in the sky.” The desire for permanence, for beauty to outlast loss, is palpable. The poem ends on a moment of raw recognition—when all else fails, when even love cannot prevent loss, one can only “swear at emptiness because you know it’s the animal that will win.” Emptiness, death, entropy—these are the forces that ultimately consume everything. The speaker’s final act of defiance is not an attempt to reconcile this truth but simply to rage against it, to acknowledge loss without pretending it can be undone.

Hicok’s style in “Shopping at the Ocean” is conversational, full of digressions and tonal shifts that mimic the way emotions unfold in real time. The enjambment and fluid movement between subjects—shopping, childhood, aging, loss, love—create a sense of inevitable progression, as if the poem itself is mirroring the inescapable passage of time. His use of humor and self-awareness prevents the poem from sinking into sentimentality, even as it deals with profound sorrow. The imagery is striking and unexpected, weaving together mundane details and surreal visions in a way that makes both feel equally real.

At its core, “Shopping at the Ocean” is about the helplessness of love in the face of mortality. The speaker and his companion are caught between their desires to save, to hold on, and the knowledge that loss is inevitable. The poem does not offer resolution or comfort—only the recognition that love exists alongside loss, that grief is as much a part of life as the small moments of connection that make it bearable. In the end, the only response is to keep going, to keep buying soap and corn chips, to keep listening, to keep trying, even when it is clear that the animal of emptiness will win.

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