by Jack Spicer
The prize is there at the bottom of the rainbow—follow the invisible markings processwise
I, Gawain, who am no longer human but a legend followed the markings
Did
More or less what they asked
My name is now a symbol for shame
I, Gawain, who once was a knight of the Grail in a dark forest.
End of Book of Gawain
THE BOOK OF PERCIVAL
1.
Fool-
Killer lurks between the branches of every tree
Bird-language.
Fooled by nature, I
Accepted the quest gracefully
Played the fool. Fool-
Killer in the branches waiting.
Left home. Fool-killer left home too. Followed me.
Fool-
Killer thinks that just before the moment I will find the grail he will catch me. Poor
Little boy in the forest
Dancing.
2.
Even the forest felt deserted when he left it. What nonsense!
The enormous trees. The lakes with carp in them. The wolves and badgers. They
Should feel deserted for a punk kid who has left them?
Even the forest felt deserted. There were no leaves dropping or sounds anybody could hear.
The wind met resistance but no noise, the sky
Could not be heard through the water.
Percival
Fool, like badger, pinetree, broken water,
Gone.
3.
“Ship of fools,” the wise man said to me.
“I used to work in Chicago in a department store,” I said to the wise man never knowing that there would be a ship
Whose tiny sails, grail bearing
Would have to support me
All the loves of my life
Each impossible choice I had been making. Wave
Upon wave.
“Fool,” I could hear them shouting for we were becalmed in some impossible harbor
The grail and me
And in impossible armor
The spooks that bent the ship
Forwards and backwards.
4.
If someone doesn’t fight me I’ll have to wear this armor
All of my life. I look like the Tin Woodsman in the Oz Books.
Rusted beyond recognition.
I am, sir, a knight. Puzzled
By the way things go toward me and in back of me. And finally into my mouth and head and red blood
O, damn these things that try to maim me
This armor
Fooled
Alive in its
Self.
5.
The hermit said dance and I danced
I was always meeting hermits on the road
Who said what I was to do and I did it or got angry and didn’t
Knowing always what was not expected of me.
She electrocuted herself with her own bathwater
I pulled the plug
And there was darkness (the Hermit said)
Deeper than any hallow.
6.
It was not searching the grail or finding it that prompted me
It was playing the fool (Fool-killer along at my back
Playing the fool.)
I knew that the cup or the dish or the knights I fought didn’t have anything to do with it
Fool-killer and I were fishing in the same ocean
“And at the end of whose line?” I asked him once when I met him in my shadow.
“You ask the wrong questions” and at that my shadow jumped up and beat itself against a rock, “or rather the wrong questions to the wrong person”
At the end of whose line
I now lie
Hanging.
7.
No visible means of support
The Grail hung there like june-berries in October or something I had felt and forgotten.
This was a palace and an ocean I was in
A ship that cast its water on the tide A grail, a real grail. Snark-hungry.
The Grail hung there with the seagulls circling round it and the pain of my existence soothed
“Fool,” they sang in voices more like angels watching
“Fool.”
End of Book of Percival
THE BOOK OF LANCELOT
1.
Tony (another Tony)
All the deer in all the forests of Britain could not pay for the price of this dish
Lancelot took a chance on this, heard the adulterous sparrows murmuring in the adulterous woods
Willing to pay the price of this with his son or his own body.
More simply, your heavy hands (and all the deer of Britain) a grail-searcher has need.
2.
Walking on the beach and you both hear the sound the ocean makes.
The sailors at Tarawa, Java, burning oil at their backs
Swimming for dear life.
You say, and he says and meaningless says the beach’s ocean
Grail at point 029.
In the slick of the thing music
Waves brushing past the beach as if they wanted to be human
The sailors screaming.
Walking on the beach, fondly or not fondly, they hear the sound the
Ocean makes.
3.
Nobody’s stranger than the stranger coming to the dinner
He can imitate anything or anybody.
“When they start climbing up the back of the old flash” the runner who had simply hit a single almost had passed him “It is time to quit. I’ll never play again.”
Almost saw the cup, Lancelot, his eyes so filled with tears.
4.
Love cannot exist between people
Trial balloons. How fated the whole thing is.
It is as if there exists a large beach with no one on it.
Eaches calling each on the paths. Essentially ocean.
You do know Graham how I love you and you love me
but nothing can stop the roar of the tide. The grail, not there, becomes a light which is not able to be there like a lighthouse or spindrift
No, Graham, neither of us can stop the pulse and beat of it
The roar.
5.
Lancelot fucked Gwenivere only four times.
He fucked Elaine twenty times
At least. She had a child and died from it.
Hero Lancelot feared the question “what is the holy grail?” which nobody asked him.
All the snow on the mountain
It was
For a time
His question to answer.
6.
The Irish have only invented three useful things:
Boston, The Holy Grail, and fairies.
This is not to imply that Boston, The Holy Grail and fairies do not exist.
They do and are to be proved in time as much as the package of Lucky Strike cigarettes you smoke or the village your grandmother came from.
Jack, jokes aside, is very much like entering that forest
Perilous
No place for Lancelot, who has killed more men
Than you I-
Rish will ever see.
7.
He has all the sense of fun of an orange, Gawain once explained to a trusted friend.
His sense of honor is too much barely to carry his body
The horse he rides on (Dada) will never go anywhere. Sharp, in the palace, he wanders alone among intellectual servants
He sings a song to himself as he goes out to look for the thing.
The Grail will not be his
Obviously.
End of Book of Lancelot
THE BOOK OF GWENIVERE
1.
Lance, lets figure out where we stand
On the beach of some inland sea which cannot be called an ocean
The river in back of us is green.
The river is wet. Down it floats what is not the
grail-mistress, several magicians and dead seagulls. Harp
On the same theme. Play the wild chorus over and over again—the music magic
Lady of the Lake I hate you; cannot stand your casual
Way the wind blows. Listen,
I am Gwenivere.
2.
The question is pretty simple. I would never have been admitted to the Grail Castle but if I had been I would have asked it: “Why
Did you admit me to the Grail Castle?” That would have stopped him.
I am sick of the invisible world and all its efforts to be visible
What eyes
(Yours or mine)
Are worth seeing it
Or, Lance, what eyes (mine and yours) when, looking at each other we forget the Grail Castle for a moment at least
Make it worth seeing it?
3.
Good Friday now. They are saying mass in the Grail Castle
The dumb old king
Awaits
The scourge, the vinegar, the lance, for the umptiumpth time
Not Christ, but a substitute for Christ as Christ was a substitute.
You knights go out to tear him from the cross like he was a fairy princess turned into a toad
The cup that keeps the blood shed, bled into
Is a hoax, a hole
I see it dis-
Appear.
4.
What you don’t understand are depths and shadows
They grow, Lance, though the sun covers them in a single day.
Grails here, grails there, grails tomorrow
A trick of light.
A trick of light streaming from the cup
You say, knowing only the unbent rock
The shells
That have somehow survived their maker.
The depths and shadows are beside all of this, somehow
Returning
Each man to what of him is not bone and skin and mortal
The moon
Which is beautiful and shell of the earth
Streaming.
5.
Sometimes I wonder what you are looking for. The Monday
After Christ died the women came to his tomb and the angel said “What are you looking for?”
A sensible question.
The bloody lance that pierced his side, the scourge, the vinegar had all turned into relics
Why beat a dead horse?
The women, who were no better than they should be, hadn’t seen him
If there really was a Christ only
This will happen in the Grail Castle
6.
Boo! I tell you all
Scape-ghosts and half-ghosts
you do not know what is going to appear.
Is going to appear at the proper place like you, Lance
Salt Lake City, New York, Jerusalem, Hell, The Celestial City
Winking and changing like a light in some dark harbor. Damn
The ghosts of the unbent flame, the pixies, the kobalds, the dwarves eating jewels underground, the lives that seem to have nothing to do except to make you have
Adventures.
Naked
I lie in this bed. The spooks
Around me animate themselves.
Boo! Hello!
Lance, the cup is heavy. Drop the cup!
7.
This teacup Christ bled into. You are so polite, Lance
All your heros are so polite
They would make a cat scream.
I dreamed last night that your body had become a gigantic adventure. Wild horses
Could not tear it away from itself.
I
Was the whole earth you were traveling over
Rock, sand, and water.
Christ, and this little teacup
Were always between us.
I was a witch, Lance. My body was not the earth, yours not wild horses or what wild horses could not tear
Politely, your body woke me up
And I saw the bent morning
End of Book of Gwenivere
THE BOOK OF MERLIN
1.
“Go to jail. Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.00.”
The naked sound of a body sounds like a trumpet through all this horseshit.
You do not go to jail. You stay there unmoved at what any physical or metaphysical policemen do.
You behave like Gandhi. Your
Magic will be better than their magic. You await that time with hunger.
Strike
Against the real things. The colonial Hengest and Horsa
The invasion of Britain was an invasion of the spirit.
2.
Wohin auf das Auge blicket
Moor und Heide rings herum
Vogelsang uns nicht erquicket
Eichen stehen kahl und krumm.
Lost in the peril of their own adventure
Grail-searchers im Konzentrationslage
A Jew stole the grail the first time
And a jew died into it
That is the history of Britain.
The politics of the world of spooks is as random as that of a Mesopotamian kingdom
Merlin (who saw two ways at the least of the river, the bed of the river.) Maer-
Chen ausgeschlossen.
3.
The tower he built himself
From some kind of shell that came from his hide
He pretended that he was a radio station and listened to grail-music all day and all night every day and every night.
Shut up there by a treachery that was not quite his own (he could not remember whose treachery it was) he predicted the future of Britain.
The land is hollow, he said, it consists of caves and holes so immense that eagles or nightingales could not fly in them
Love,
The Grail, he said,
No matter what happened.
4.
Otherwise everything was brilliant
Flags loose in the wind. A tournament
For live people. Disengagement as from the throat to the loin or the sand to the ocean.
The flags
Of another country.
Flags hover in the breeze
Mary Baker Eddy alone in her attempt
To slake Thursdays. Sereda,
Oh, how chill the hill
Is with the snow on it
What a semblance of
Flags.
5.
Then the thought of Merlin became more than imprisoned Merlin
A jail-castle
Was built on these grounds.
Sacco and Vanzetti and Lion-Hearted Richard and Dillinger who somehow almost lost the Grail. Political prisoners
Political prisoners. Willing to rise from their graves.
“The enemy is in your own country,” he wrote that when Gawain and Percival and almost everybody else was stumbling around after phantoms
There was a Grail but he did not know that
Jailed.
6.
That’s it Clyde, better hit the road farewell
That’s it Clyde better hit the road
You’re not a frog you’re a horny toad. Goodbye, farewell, adios.
The beach reaching its ultimate instant. A path over the sand.
And the toadfrog growing enormous in the shadow of fogged-in waters. The Lady of the Lakes. Monstrous.
This is not the end because like a distant bullet
A ship comes up. I don’t see anybody on it. I am Merlin imprisoned in a branch of the Grail Castle.
7.
“Heimat du bist wieder mein”
Heimat. Heimat ohne Ferne
You are called to the phone.
You are called to the phone to predict what will happen to Britain. The great silver towers she gave you. What you are in among
You are called to predict the exact island that your ancestors came from
Carefully now will there be a Grail or a Bom
b which tears the heart out of things?
I say there will be no fruit in Britain for seven years unless something happens.
End of Book of Merlin
THE BOOK OF GALAHAD
1.
Backyards and barnlots
If he only could have stopped talking for a minute he could have understood the prairies of American
Whitman, I mean, not Galahad who were both born with the same message in their throats
Contemplating America from Long Island Sound or the Grail from purity is foolish, not in a bad sense but fool-ish as if words or poetry could save you.
The Indians who still walked around the Plains were dead and the Grail-searchers were dead and neither of them knew it.
Innocent in the wind, the sound of a real bird’s voice
In-vented.
2.
Galahad was invented by American spies. There is no reason to think he existed.
There are agents in the world to whom true and false are laughable. Galahad laughed
When he was born because his mother’s womb had been so funny. He laughed at the feel of being a hero.
Pure. For as he laughed the flesh fell off him
And the Grail appeared before him like a flashlight.
Whatever was to be seen
Underneath.
3.
“We’re off to see the Wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oz,”
Damned Austrailians marching into Greece on a fool’s errand.
The cup said “Drink me” so we drank
Shrinking or rising in size depending how the bullets hit us
Galahad had a clearer vision. Was an SS officer in that war or a nervous officer (Albanian, say), trying to outline the cup through his glasses.
The Grail lives and hovers
Like bees
Around the camp and their love, their corpses. Honey-makers
Damned Austrailians marching into Greece on a fool’s errand.
4.
To drink that hard liquor from the cold bitter cup.
I’ll tell you the story. Galahad, bastard son of Elaine
Was the only one allowed to find it. Found it in such a way that the dead stayed dead, the waste land stayed a waste land. There were no shoots from the briers or elm trees.