Prodigal

By Bob Hicok b. 1960 Bob Hicok

You could drive out of this country

and attack the world with your ambition,

invent wonder plasmas,

become an artist of the provocative gesture,

the suggestive nod, you could leave

wanting the world and return

carrying it, a noisy bundle

of steam and libido, a ball of fire

balanced on your tongue,

you might reclaim Main Street in a limo

longer than a sermon, wave at our red faces

while remembering that you were born

a clod hopper, a farmer’s kid,

and get over that hump once and for all

by telling A Great Man’s stories—

the dirty jokes of dictators, tidbits

of presidential hygiene, insights

into the psychotropic qualities of power

and the American tradition of kissing

moneyed ass. Your uncle would still

call you Roy Boy, pheasants

sun themselves beside the tracks,

waiting for the dew to burn off

before their first flight, and corn

grow so high that if you stood

in the field you’d disappear, the fact

aiming your eyes down the road.

Source: The Legend of Light (University of Wisconsin Press, 1995)

Biography

Bob Hicok was born in 1960 in Michigan and worked for many years in the automotive die industry. A published poet long before he earned his MFA, Hicok is the author of several collections of poems, including The Legend of Light, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry in 1995 and named a 1997 ALA Booklist Notable Book of the Year; Plus Shipping (1998); Animal Soul (2001), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; . . .

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