by Jack Spicer
Gout-ridden angel, slayer of oceans
Gout-ridden common-angel, keeper of virtue
Deliver my natural body.
For it was I who died
With every tide.
I am the land.
I was the sea.
Each grain of sand
With us will be
If we are dead.
AN APOCALYPSE FOR THREE VOICES
Lactantius writing on the Apocalypse says:
“Qui autem ab inferis suscitabantur praeerunt
viventibus velut judices—They, moreover, shall
be raised from the depths that they shall stand
above the living as judges.”
I dreamt the ocean died, gave up its dead.
The last spasmatic tides, the final waves
Were crowded with escaping ghosts; the tides
Were choked and strangled with the weight of flesh
And falling bone. And soon the homeward floating ceased.
The dead awoke. Once they had mouths and said,
“When all we dead awaken,” they awoke.
When all we dead—
(but I have talked to the king of the rats
and I have walked with the king of the rats
and I have bowed to the king of the rats
and the king of the rats has said to me—
When all we dead—
(but I have talked to the king of the swans
and I have walked with the king of the swans
and I have bowed to the king of the swans
and the king of the swans has said to me—
Awaken.
The Sunday Chronicle presents the dream
In slightly different order; Angel-Face
Is chased through eight cartoons by Nemesis,
By Demon Richard Tracy; each disgrace
Each new escape, is hinted out and found
And Angel-Face is cornered, caught, and drowned.
He will arise in every Sunday Chronicle
Refaced, pursued, reburied in the lake
Till Tracy roots his ever drowning heart
Into the crossroads with a phallic stake.
Or say I turn the records in a great
Electric station, our reception famed
As far as May or Babylon and back again.
My great turntable is inevitable; it whirls
Around, around, a convoluting day
A night of static sleeplessness; it plays
Requested favorites, universal things,
And millions listen, hear some tenor sing,
It’s a long, long way
From Babylon in May
To this November.
But listen to the chorus
When we dead—
Those flat and tuneless voices
When we dead—
The aching chord is broken
When we dead awaken
We will do the singing.
We will do the singing.
Their flat electric voices
Fill the sky
And Angel-Face has floated from his grave
Again to die.
Angel-Face hires lawyers from the firm
Of Ratface, Swanface, and Beelzebub.
Mr. Ratface, well-known Persian lawyer, takes the case
Faces the court, asks manslaughter on Tracy,
Slander on my station,
Death on me for treason.
Judge Swanface tries the case without a word
And orders Juryman Beelzebub
To give me death. The juror says,
“I sentence you to drown three times
When we dead
(The king of rats has bowed to me)
When we dead
(The king of the swans has bowed to me)
When we dead
(The king of the world has bowed to me)
Awaken and the living die.
ONE NIGHT STAND
Listen, you silk-hearted bastard,
I said in the bar last night,
You wear those dream clothes
Like a swan out of water.
Listen, you wool-feathered bastard,
My name, just for the record, is Leda.
I can remember pretending
That your red silk tie is a real heart
That your raw wool suit is real flesh
That you could float beside me with a swan’s touch
Of casual satisfaction.
But not the swan’s blood.
Waking tomorrow, I remember only
Somebody’s feathers and his wrinkled heart
Draped loosely in my bed.
AN ANSWER TO JAIME DE ANGULO
If asked whether I am goyim,
Whether I am an enemy to your people,
I would reply that I am of a somewhat older people.
My people (the gay, who are neither Jew nor goyim)
Were caught in your Lord God Jehovah’s first pogrom
Out at Sodom.
No one was very indignant about it.
Looking backwards at us is hard on neutrals (ask Mrs. Lot someday)
You may say it was all inhospitality to angels.
You may say we’re all guilty; well, show us
An angel pacing down Hollywood, wings folded,
And try us.
A LECTURE IN PRACTICAL AESTHETICS
Entering the room
Mr. Stevens on an early Sunday morning
Wore sailor-whites and helmet.
He had brought a couple with him and they danced like bears
He had brought a bottle with him and the vapors rose
From helmet, naked bottle, couple
Haloed him and wakened us.
But Mr. Stevens, listen, sight and sense are dull
And heavier than vapor and they cling
And weigh with meaning.
To floors and bottoms of the sea, horizon them
You are an island of our sea, Mr. Stevens, perhaps rare
Certainly covered with upgrowing vegetation.
You may consist of dancing animals. The bear,
Mr. Stevens, may be your emblem,
Rampant on a white field or panting in plurals above the floor and the ocean,
And you a bearish Demiurge, Mr. Stevens, licking vapor
Into the shape of your island. Fiercely insular.
Out of sense and sight, Mr. Stevens, you may unambiguously dance
Buoying the helmet and the couple,
The bottle and the dance itself—
But consider, Mr. Stevens, though imperceptible,
We are also alive. It is not right that you should merely touch us.
Besides, Mr. Stevens, any island in our sea
Needs a geographer.
A geographer, Mr. Stevens, tastes islands
Finds in this macro-cannibalism his own microcosm.
To form a conceit, Mr. Stevens, in finding you
He chews upon his flesh. Chews it, Mr. Stevens,
Like Donne down to the very bone.
An island, Mr. Stevens, should be above such discoveries,
Available but slightly mythological.
Our resulting map will be misleading.
Though it be drawn, Mr. Stevens,
With the blood and flesh of both superimposed
As ink on paper, it will be no picture, no tourist postcard
Of the best of your contours reflected on water.
It will be a map, Mr. Stevens, a county stiffened into symbols
And that’s poetry too, Mr. Stevens, and I’m a geographer.
DIALOGUE BETWEEN INTELLECT AND PASSION
“Passion is alien to intellect
As hot black doves are alien to trees
On which they do not rest—
All are alone.
Of passion and of intellect
Suspect
Neither bird nor tree
Of vicious privacy—
Nothing is intimate.<
br />
Doves without rest
Must blackly test
Each branch with every claw they lack
And trees alone
Are tough as thrones
With too much sovereignty.”
“Above your branches every hot black dove
Protests his love
And gathers in great swarms
As darkness comes.
They wait
Until the darkness make
Them dream-birds black
As needles and as ultimate.
As you branch blanketed in royalty
Each lacking claw, bird-real,
Will find its rest
Throughout your naked branches,
Make you feel
Birds in the bed
Locking their claws against
Your privacy.”
A NIGHT IN FOUR PARTS (Second Version)
Part I: Going to Sleep
While the heart twists
On a cold bed
Without sleep,
Under the hot light
Of an angry moon
A cat leaps.
The cat prowls
Into cold places,
But the heart stays
Where the blood is.
Part II: Light Sleeping
Down in the world
Where the cat prowls,
Heart’s manikin,
His climbing doll
Prepares for love:
Spawns eye, spawns mouth,
Spawns throat, spawns genitals.
Heart is so monstrous naked that the world recoils,
Shakes like a ladder,
Spits like a cat,
Disappears.
Part III: Wet Dream
Downward it plunges through the walls of flesh,
Heart falls
Through lake and cavern under sleep
Deep like an Orpheus
A beating mandolin
Plucking the plectrum of the moon upon its strings,
It sings, it sings, it sings.
It sings, “Restore, restore, Eurydice to life.
Oh, take the husband and return the wife.”
It sings still deeper, conjures by its spell
Eurydice, the alley cat of Hell.
“Meow, meow, Eurydice’s not dead.
Oh, find a cross-eyed tomcat for my bed.”
Too late, it was too late he fell.
The sounds of singing and the sounds of Hell
Become a swarm of angry orange flies
And naked Orpheus, moon-shriveled, dies
And rises leaving lost Eurydice.
His heart falling upward towards humanity
Howling and half-awake.
Part IV: Waking
Heart wakes
Twists like a cat on hot bricks
Beating off sunlight.
Now the heart slinks back to the blood
And the day starts.
Then the blood asks,
“Who was that lover
That thrashed you around last night?”
And the heart can’t answer.
ORPHEUS IN HELL
When he first brought his music into hell
He was absurdly confident. Even over the noise of the shapeless fires
And the jukebox groaning of the damned
Some of them would hear him. In the upper world
He had forced the stones to listen.
It wasn’t quite the same. And the people he remembered
Weren’t quite the same either. He began looking at faces
Wondering if all of hell were without music.
He tried an old song but pain
Was screaming on the jukebox and the bright fire
Was pelting away the faces and he heard a voice saying,
“Orpheus!”
He was at the entrance again
And a little three-headed dog was barking at him.
Later he would remember all those dead voices
And call them Eurydice.
ORPHEUS AFTER EURYDICE
Then I, a singer and hunter, fished
In streams too deep for love.
A god grew there, a god grew there,
A wet and weblike god grew there.
Mella, mella peto
In medio flumine.
His flesh is honey and his bones are made
Of brown, brown sugar and he is a god.
He is a god.
I know he is a god.
Mella, mella peto
In medio flumine.
Drink wine, I sang, drink cold red wine.
Grow liquid, spread yourself.
O bruise yourself, intoxicate yourself,
Dilute yourself.
You want to web the rivers of the world.
You want to glue the tides together with yourself.
You look so innocent—
Water wouldn’t melt in your mouth.
I looked and saw him weep a honey tear.
I, Orpheus, had raised a water god
That wept a honey tear.
Mella, mella peto
In medio flumine.
ORPHEUS’ SONG TO APOLLO
You, Apollo, have yoked your horse
To the wrong sun.
You have picked the wrong flower.
Breaking a branch of impossible
Green-stemmed hyacinth
You have found thorns and postulated a rose.
Sometimes we were almost like lovers
(As the sun almost touches the earth at sunset)
But,
At touch,
The horse leapt like an ox
Into another orbit of roses, roses.
Perhaps,
If the moon were made of cold green cheese,
I could call you Diana.
Perhaps,
If a knife could peel that rosy rind,
It would find you virgin as a star.
Too hot to move.
Nevertheless,
This is almost goodbye.
You,
Fool Apollo,
Stick
Your extra roses somewhere where they’ll keep.
I like your aspiration
But the sky’s too deep
For fornication.
TROY POEM
We,
Occasioned by the eye,
To look
And looking down
Saw that your city was not Troy.
Oh,
Merry Greeks,
We bear our fathers on our backs
And burdened thus
We kiss your city.
Neither
At foot or eye
Do we taste
Ruined Troy
Which was our mother.
Oh,
Merry Greeks,
When you embrace us
We, bending, thus
Pray against you:
“Rise
From our absent city
Tough as smoke—
Oh,
Flesh of Hector,
Rescue us.”
“We find the body difficult to speak . . .”
We find the body difficult to speak,
The face too hard to hear through,
We find that eyes in kissing stammer
And that heaving groins
Babble like idiots.
Sex is an ache of mouth. The
Squeak our bodies make
When they rub mouths against each other
Trying to talk.
Like silent little children we embrace,
Aching together.
And love is emptiness of ear. As cure
We put a face against our ear
And listen to it as we would a shell,
Soothed by its roar.
We find the body difficult, and speak
Across its wall like strangers.
“ They are selling the midnight papers . . .”
Every
street has alleys and within the alleys
There are criminals and policemen.
I said, “Tonight
The moon is like a dead gangster.”
I heard him giggle like a hound. “The moon,”
He said, “is spooky. We should lie upon our backs
And howl.”
And so we walked, uneasy, wondering
If there were justice anywhere
Within this midnight city,
Or how, without a hat, one could distinguish
A vice-squad member from a glass of beer,
Or whether if one met them walking hand in hand
One could tell Bugsy Siegel from Virginia Woolf.
They are selling the midnight papers,
The moon is wearing brass knuckles.
“Any fool can get into an ocean . . .”
Any fool can get into an ocean
But it takes a Goddess
To get out of one.
What’s true of oceans is true, of course,
Of labyrinths and poems. When you start swimming
Through riptide of rhythms and the metaphor’s seaweed
You need to be a good swimmer or a born Goddess
To get back out of them
Look at the sea otters bobbing wildly
Out in the middle of the poem
They look so eager and peaceful playing out there where the water hardly moves
You might get out through all the waves and rocks
Into the middle of the poem to touch them
But when you’ve tried the blessed water long
Enough to want to start backward
That’s when the fun starts
Unless you’re a poet or an otter or something supernatural
You’ll drown, dear. You’ll drown
Any Greek can get you into a labyrinth
But it takes a hero to get out of one
What’s true of labyrinths is true of course
Of love and memory. When you start remembering.
THE SCROLLWORK ON THE CASKET
To walk down the streets with a dead man or to hold conversation with him over coffee in a public restaurant would be hopelessly eccentric. To entertain a corpse in private, to worry him in the privacy of one’s room or in the cramped and more frightening privacy of a short story is an eccentricity more easily forgivable.
A short story is narrower than a room in a cheap hotel; it is narrower than the wombs through which we descended. It does violence to any large dead man to force him within it. To fit him (even his body) into the casket of a few paragraphs, he must be twisted and contorted; his stiff arms, his extended legs must be hacked or broken. A rigor mortis operates within the memory; his image stiffens and resists in every inch. One must maim him to fit him in.