Man of the House

By Bob Hicok b. 1960 Bob Hicok

It was a misunderstanding.

I got into bed, made love

with the woman I found there,

called her honey, mowed the lawn,

had three children, painted

the house twice, fixed the furnace,

overcame an addiction to blue pills,

read Spinoza every night

without once meeting his God,

buried one child, ate my share

of Jell-o and meatloaf,

went away for nine hours a day

and came home hoarding my silence,

built a ferris wheel in my mind,

bolt by bolt, then it broke

just as it spun me to the top.

Turns out I live next door.

Hicok, Bob. "Man of the House" from The Legend of Light. Copyright © 1995. Reprinted by permission of The University of Wisconsin Press.

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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