What is the lyrhick, you ask — or perhaps you don’t. In any case, the lyrhick is a lyric poem with gravel in its throat. You can learn something from the lyrhick like you can from an older cousin who takes you fishing and gives you your first beer. But the lyrhick is not didactic. It isn’t a maintenance manual, a troubleshooting guide. It reaches down into the spirit like reaching into the mouth of a trout who’s gone and inhaled the fly. The lyrhick has depth to it. The lyrhick, it should be said, is also anonymous. One cannot carry one’s name into the lyrhick — it is to names what a black hole is to light. If you come up to the lyrhick from behind you’ll find that it was watching you. Eyes grow from the back of its head like mushrooms that pushed up in the night, still robed in dead leaves. The lyrhick sees you before you see it, like the buck you thought you were stalking. It was you who was being stalked. By the time you write the lyrhick you find it has already written itself — it appears under your hand like ice on a pane, like a boy’s first downy mustache, natural and disturbing. The lyrhick drinks gallons of beer. It doesn’t like wine and steers clear of liquor. The lyrhick has never won a poetry prize. It saunters into the big chambers where poetry is adjudicated wearing waders and wading boots. It has ticks in its hair. There’s always a beautiful girl, somebody’s sister, willing to give the lyrhick’s scalp a once-over. The lyrhick makes for a terrible dinner companion. Better to go over to the lyrhick’s house, let it cook. The lyrhick can really cook. The lyrhick is one of those friends you feel so tender towards you grow shy around them. If you’re in bad shape, the lyrhick seems to know somehow, shows up with a six-pack of Hamm’s and a story that seems to have nothing to do with your heart, though in the end it sort of does. The lyrhick had its heart broken beyond repair when it was a child. You better see you don’t fall in love with the lyrhick. Many have and look at them now — pale, walking creek beds under tangled tackle, turning over stones. Oh it can be dire for the ones who fall under the lyrhick’s sway. Best to try to keep a little distance if you can. The lyrhick would rather come to you obliquely anyway, like your father patting your shoulder as he passes behind you, like a dream in which you watch yourself die. The lyrhick wears baggy jeans with big pockets for all the stuff the lyrhick carries. There’s a knife, of course, tucked into itself like a sleeping swan, the long thin blade curving at the end like a candle when there’s a draught. The lyrhick carries a pencil, too, with no eraser, and a little notebook with a calendar in it like the kind you find on the counter at the insurance company. The days are filled with poems. The lyrhick carries a picture of its parents — its mother was a musician with long, delicate fingers, while its father was no good, passing in and out of the lyrhick’s life on a whim. They died when the lyrhick was seven. Every year the lyrhick visits the curve they missed. It knows they were fighting, and that its dad missed the curve on purpose and aimed for the tree. He’d been unfaithful. The lyrhick is nothing if not faithful, though to what or to whom is a mystery. The lyrhick is an amateur geologist. Usually it carries a stone it wants to show the old timers it drinks with, something that might be worth keeping on the windowsill, though usually it throws it away on the walk home. The lyrhick always has a box of toothpicks for cleaning its teeth, about which it is assiduous, sensitive to the stereotype that its kind have bad dental hygiene. You’ll never catch the lyrhick with a blade of grass in its mouth. You probably won’t see the lyrhick period, unless you get to writing one. It only appears when asked for, like a friend who’s only good in a crisis. What’s that? What else is in the lyrhick’s pockets? The lyrhick always seems to have a lot of cash on it, but, in general, no money.
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Notes on the Lyrhick
Excellent.