My New Neighbor

I found the poem, My New Neighbor by Bob Hicok, to be both unique and strange in more ways than one. The poem starts out with the voice of the poem coming in contact with a nearby cow, where he focuses all of his attention on “the congregation of flies on the eye of the cow.” After reading the first eight to ten lines, the image of a cow’s eye surrounded by hundreds of tiny fly eyeballs staring at the speaker promptly jumped in my head. I could not figure out the significance of the “flies,” possibly Hicok wanted to choose an image/bug/animal that forced the reader to think of eyes and nothing else. And when I think of the words “eyes” and “staring” I feel as though the author was trying to show that all attention was being placed on the main character of the poem. But it may have no significance at all.

In general, this poem has a very captivating use of language. Phrases such as “I want to touch the cow---and the cow seemed to ask to be touched” are very odd and do a great job of adding to the strange nature of the speaker. This strange character seems to be on a personal level with this cow, throwing around assumptions that he knew this cow’s entire life story. He was talking to the animal as if he were a person; calling him “42” as the tag on his ear denoted. Seems like a strange form of personification; considering the cow is a living thing but has few characteristics of a human being. Then he goes on about how the tag will help the cow become cheeseburgers which is the “calling of cows in these parts.”

The poem then takes a very interesting turn. The speaker notices that “42” lives in the vicinity of a Presbyterian Church and orders the other cows around. After realizing this, the speaker assumes 42 must be an atheist. He then tries to discuss metaphysical theory with the cow by explaining that agnosticism is more plausible, considering it is too hard to think of our existence without a beginning. This part of the poem seems to reassure the reader of how “confused/ill/out-there” the speaker actually is. And after this whole explanation, the cow simply looks up at the speaker and blinks (which is quite a funny image to think about). And finally, the poem ends with an interesting use of repetition; the last phrase being, “It is comforting to talk to large animals, whether they listen or not.” The line is then repeated once more, but starts with the phrase “I said”---a phrase usually used because someone, or in this case something, did did not hear the first time. He may have used "I said" because he did not hear a response the first time and said it once more as if the cow had not heard him. Basically he confuses a cows lack of attention with their inability to speak english.

---Albert Sementa