Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Bob Hicok’s "Tuesday’s Walk" is a meandering yet deeply intimate meditation on movement, memory, and the way the physical world interacts with personal and shared experience. The poem drifts through a seemingly simple act—a walk on a Tuesday evening—yet expands into a complex meditation on time, language, loss, and the unspoken bonds between people and place. Hicok’s signature humor, conversational tone, and unexpected philosophical turns guide the piece, allowing the ordinary to unfold into something profound.

The opening line—"This was before stars."—is an immediate disruption of expectation. It gestures toward a primal or timeless setting, as if the walk occurs in a world not yet formed or fully realized. The sky is described in terms of color, "a thin broth of clouds out west," and the debate over whether "cobalt or azure" is the correct term captures both the limits of language and the human need to name and categorize experience. Yet, in a moment of epiphany, the speaker and companion abandon words altogether: "finally we threw our mouths away when language got in the way of being stunned." This rejection of language in the face of beauty or awe is an underlying theme in the poem—words can sometimes fail to contain experience, and the body, the senses, must take over where speech falters.

As they walk, Hicok juxtaposes the grand and the mundane, the cosmic and the domestic. "The earth was new and the carnage small." The phrase is playful, suggesting a world where destruction is limited to "squirrels decapitating tulips" and "lawns with the acne of grubs." This whimsical violence contrasts with the deeper, more existential losses that will emerge later in the poem. When the magnolia tree is observed "losing faith," the conversation shifts toward metaphor, moving from the natural to the human—does a tree shed its flowers like a woman undressing, or like a man? The speaker humorously asserts, "The reasons I’d wear a dress all begin with spring," a moment of lightness that acknowledges a different kind of sensual awareness—the feeling of honeysuckle against bare skin, the bodily pleasure of certain seasons.

The poem then moves into a reflection on habit and place: "On we went, the same path as any night or nearly, sometimes we go up a street we usually go down, fascinating isn’t it." The mundane reality of walking the same streets night after night is acknowledged with self-deprecating humor, yet the details that follow—"the appearance of a phalanx of gnomes or the assassination of a mailbox by cherry bomb"—underscore how the smallest changes can disrupt routine, making the familiar new. This attentiveness to shifting details—the "steadfast shelter of awnings," the "nostalgia perfume of just mowed grass"—reveals how people become rooted in place, how memory and observation intertwine.

As the conversation continues, death enters the frame: "That night that morning came up, how a song in a dead man’s voice about finding love made her think of a friend recently lost to a failure of blood, of another’s tidy suicide, who slipped a bag over his head before the gun, most of all and all day her grandfather, whose body had so recently given up." Here, personal loss accumulates, each death distinct yet forming a shared grief. The phrase "failure of blood" is particularly striking—it reduces death to an almost mechanical failure, an organic inevitability, making the human body seem fragile, contingent. This shift from playfulness to solemnity, from trees shedding flowers to loved ones shedding life, is characteristic of Hicok’s work. He allows the movement of thought to dictate the poem’s shape, seamlessly transitioning between humor, observation, and grief.

The speaker responds to his companion’s grief not with platitudes, but with his own observation from the day: "how I watched a boy lick sap from a maple, immune to the sky and traffic, to all thoughts but the world as candy." This image of childlike wonder—the impulse to taste the world, to experience it in the most direct way—contrasts with the heaviness of loss. The boy’s pure, unselfconscious engagement with nature is a kind of answer to mortality, an assertion that life still holds sweetness. The moment recalls the earlier desire to shed language in favor of direct experience, to replace words with sensation.

The poem reaches its most intimate moment when the speaker and his companion, inspired by the child, "each licked the bark and compared the taste by sharing tongues." This strange, almost primal act of communion suggests an alternative way of processing grief—through embodiment, through physical engagement with the world. Rather than being overwhelmed by loss, they lean into presence, into the physicality of being alive. The poem closes with a final act of resistance, as a barking "white cloud of poodle" rushes at them, and "we refused from embrace to give ground." The refusal to step back, to be pushed out of their moment of connection, becomes symbolic of a larger defiance—against fear, against the relentless forward motion of time, against the small and large deaths that populate life.

Hicok’s "Tuesday’s Walk" is a poem of movement, both physical and emotional. It captures the way casual conversation—about color, about trees, about childhood memories—can give way to deeper contemplations of loss and love. The poem resists easy conclusions, instead presenting a world where observation, humor, and sensory experience are the only reliable anchors. The final image of standing firm, of refusing to be interrupted in an embrace, suggests that in the face of uncertainty, connection—whether to another person, to place, or to the taste of bark on the tongue—is what allows life to be bearable.

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