Other Lives And Dimensions And Finally A Love Poem

Bob Hicok

“I like the idea of different theres and elsewheres” says the persona from Bob Hicok’s charming little meditative piece of writing that inches lovingly towards its ‘Finally’. Today, a friend shared a meme today about virtual connections with people - it said, “having 3 different conversations on 3 different apps with the same person”. That is one way of thinking about other dimensions and other lives. Also today, I came across the idea of “touch deprivation” a real physio-psychological phenomenon that has definitely been worsened by the pandemic (This piece of information was relayed with action prompts that included “Nature, nature, nature more, bored Instagram scrolling less”.) I thought also, of the way true poetry touches us, and of Ada Limon’s glorious exhortation in ‘The End of Poetry’ - “I am asking you to touch me”.

That there are multiple selves, multiple expressions of vulnerability and yearning, desire and melancholy, is something we know intuitively, and learn to read in the great library of relationships and misunderstandings. This incoherence of identity is often offset by its sudden crystallisation into form during moments of rupture (and even rapture, perhaps, eh?). And then it dissolves to become somthing else. We spend our lives wading through multiple selves, traversing the slow narrow road between the clunky spirits of our pasts, our impossible presents, and wishful futures. For this current self that is writing this post, poetry is a way of coming closer and closer to these distorted shadows, touching them and holding on to their blurred outlines. While sometimes it can be unnerving, discovering the many selves that inhabit the dilapidated bodies of others - friends, loved ones, and even those I have despised - can be pleasantly surprising. It is one way of constantly learning. Is deep friendship marked by a complete acceptance of all the selves of another? I think there’s a line in that soppy film ‘Meet Joe Black’ about knowing the worst thing about (a lover) and being ok with it, or something like that. When you think about how one person can be many people, and you think of ‘soulmates’ and emotional attachment there is always a ‘but’, a ‘despite’. Hicok’s poem is beyond such uncertainties. There is unfettered desire, complete surrender and wilful acceptance: “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.”

All this talk of hands and love and touch reminds me of a line from another beautiful love poem by the language-defying Cummings - ‘somewhere I have never travelled’ - a poem from which Agha Shahid Ali borrowed from the line I refer to, a radif for his ghazal ‘even the rain’:

‘nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands’

…Ah well, so many poems, so many conversations, so many lives, so many dimensions…

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