Grooming

Bob Hicok’s Grooming is just as unique and strange as My New Neighbor. From what I’ve read of Hicok, his poetry is very surreal and bizarre; it almost resembles a stream of consciousness, as he writes down whatever pops into his head. As for Grooming, it starts out with the line, “I shave my hair closer to my thoughts.” This line still bothers me because I find it to be rather ambiguous. At first I understood it as a reference to the scar later in the stanza; as he shaves his head he gets closer to a forgotten scar, which unravels forgotten memories. My second idea seems rather strange but it could also mean----as he shaves the hair on his head he gets closer to the place where his thoughts are; his brain.

The most popular compliment given to any poem usually deals with some sort of concrete imagery, and Grooming definitely has more than enough to comment on. In the first stanza, he talks about the scar on his head and how it is “whiter than the uncut parts of me.” We all know that scars are always a different hue than the rest of our skin, but he goes even farther with the image by describing it as a blood pact to snow angels. This seemed to be an interesting use of juxtaposition because I never really used the words “blood pact” and “snow angels” in the same sentence. The next line/image that caught my eye was at the bottom of the second stanza where he talks about the missing girl. I found the line about the girl “and I believe in God for three seconds in case it helps” to be such a great description of how a person feels when they see a sign about a missing child. The speaker is obviously hinting at atheism/agnostic by this statement, and goes as far as believing in God for a while just in case it might help in her discovery. Atheist or not, he hints at the fact that whether there is or isn’t a God, only a divine being would have the ability to undo certain injustices/tragedies. There were a couple of images near the end that I found interesting as well, such as the ant who visits the speakers shoe as a vacation spot. The second stanza also contained some ambiguous imagery which I had some trouble understanding.

As a whole, I took this poem as a man who is getting older and looking back on his life. From the scar he forgot he even had, to the reference of “his head being more naked than it was an hour ago (reference to balding?),” I definitely see some evidence to support it.

---Albert Sementa