A Visionary’s Company

Rick Hilles

Many of the poems in Rick Hilles’ chapbook are inspired by historic figures and incidents. Often using the poem as a vehicle for imaginative sympathy, he portrays Swedenborg’s mysterious spiritual searchings, Catherine Blake’s memories of life with her poet-husband William. With a keen appreciation for the symbolic, he explores the carnival-like freakishness of human idiosyncrasies and the curiosities of typography. His poems are highly intelligent, tongue-in-cheek, and distinctive. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Nation, The New Republic, and The Paris Review. Hilles was the 1999-2000 Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Creative Writing and was the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholar for 2002-03. He currently teaches creative writing at the University of Michigan.

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Excerpt

The Dangerous Light

You pay a price for this–for all this nosiness.
In rooms where you are not wanted, a light
goes out. Venetian blinds blink once and close.
The heat that comforts you speckles your sight.
That black man, he with the white cane, he knows:
You pay a price. He told me he knows the night
we know, but all the time. Sometimes it glows
around the edges like a blind made bright
from behind.
                      But often it does not.
He sleeps, and the darkness darkens more.
It covers his face like strands of lover’s hair.
He takes them in his hands, rubs the cornstalk
silk and scent across his skin. The paramour
unlocks the room now opening on air.