by Jack Spicer
I’ll teach you to love the Ranger Command
To hold a six-shooter and never to run
The brier and elm, not being human endure
The long walk down somebody’s half-dream. Terrible.
5.
Transformation then. Becoming not a fool of the grail like the others were but an arrow, ground-fog that rose up and down marshes, loosing whatever soul he had in the shadows
Tears of ivy. The whole lost land coming out to meet this soldier
Sole dier in a land of those who had to stay alive,
Cheat of dream
Monster
Casually, ghostlessly
Leaving the story
And the land was the same
The story the same
No hand
Creeping out of the shadows.
6.
The Grail was merely a cannibal pot
Where some were served and some were not
This Galahad thinks.
The Grail was mainly the upper air
Where men don’t fuck and women don’t stare
This Galahad thinks.
The Grail’s alive as a starling at dawn
That shatters the earth with her noisy song
This Galahad thinks.
But the Grail is there. Like a red balloon
It carries him with it up past the moon
Poor Galahad thinks.
Blood in the stars and food on the ground
The only connection that ever was found
Is what rich Galahad thinks.
7.
The Grail is as common as rats or seaweed
Not lost but misplaced.
Someone searching for a letter that he knows is around the house
And finding it, no better for the letter.
The grail-country damp now from a heavy rain
And growing pumpkins or artichokes or cabbage or whatever they used to grow before they started worrying about the weather. Man
Has finally no place to go but upward: Galahad’s
Testament.
End of Book of Galahad
THE BOOK OF THE DEATH OF ARTHUR
1.
“He who sells what isn’t hisn
Must pay it back or go to prison,”
Jay Gould, Cornelius Vanderbilt, or some other imaginary American millionaire
—selling short.
The heart
Is short too
Beats at one and a quarter beats a second or something like that. Fools everyone.
I am king
Of a grey city in the history books called Camelot
The door, by no human hand,
Open.
2.
Marilyn Monroe being attacked by a bottle of sleeping pills
Like a bottle of angry hornets
Lance me, she said
Lance her, I did
I don’t work there anymore.
The answer-question always the same. I cannot remember when I was not a king. The sword in the rock is like a children’s story told by my mother.
He took her life. And when she floated in on the barge or joined the nunnery or appeared dead in all the newspapers it was his shame not mine
I was king.
3.
In the episode of le damoissele cacheresse, for example, one stag, one brachet, and one fay, all of which properly belong together as the essentials for the adventures of a single hero, by a judicious arrangement supply three knights with difficult tasks, and the maiden herself wanders off with a different lover.
So here, by means of one hunt and one fairy ship, three heros are transported to three different places. When they awake the magic ship has vanished and sorry adventures await them all. Not one of them is borne by the boat, as we should naturally expect, to the love of a fay
Plainly we are dealing with materials distorted from their original form.
4.
The faint call of drums, the little signals
Folks half-true and half-false in a different way than we are half-true and half-false
A meal for us there lasts a century.
Out to greet me. I, Arthur
Rex quondam et futurus with a banjo on my knee.
I, Arthur, shouting to my bastard son “It is me you are trying to murder!”
Listening to them, they who have problems too
The faint call of them.
(They would stay in Camelot for a hundred years)
Me.
5.
I have forgotten why the grail was important
Why somebody wants to reach it like a window you throw open. Thrown open
What would it mean? What knight would fight the gorms and cobblies to touch it?
I can remember a lot about the kingdom. The peace I was going to establish. The wrong notes, the wrong notes, Merlin told me, were going to kill me.
Dead on arrival. Avalon has
Supermarkets—where the dead trade bones with the dead. Where the heros
Asking nothing
6.
The blackness remains. It remains even after the rich fisherman has done what he can do to protect home and mother. It is there like the sun.
Not lost battles or even defeated people
But blackness alive with itself
At the sides of our fires.
At home with us
And a monstrous anti-grail none of those knights could have met or invented
As real as tomorrow.
Not the threat of death. They could have conquered that. Not even bad magic.
It is a simple hole running from one thing to another. No kingdom will be saved.
No rest-
Titution.
7.
A noise in the head of the prince. A noise that travels a long ways
Past chances, broken pieces of lumber,
“Time future,” the golden head said,
“Time present. Time past.”
And the slumbering apprentice never dared to tell the master. A noise.
It annoys me to look at this country. Dead branches. Leaves unable even to grimly seize their rightful place in the tree of the heart
Annoys me
Arthur, king and future king
A noise in the head of the prince. Something in God-language. In spite of all this horseshit, this uncomfortable music.
End of Book of the Death of Arthur
GOLEM (1962)
1.
October 1, 1962
This is an ode to Horace Stoneham and Walter O’Malley.
Rottenness.
Who has driven me away from baseball like a fast car. Say
It isn’t true Joe.
This is an ode to John Wieners and Auerhahn Press
Who have driven me away from poetry like a fast car. Say
It isn’t true Joe. The fix
Has the same place in junkie-talk or real talk
It is the position
They’ve got you in.
The Giants will have a National League playoff. Duncan
Will read his poems in Seattle.
Money (I forgot the story but the little boy after it all was over came up to Shoeless
Joe Jackson) Say it isn’t true Joe.
I have seen the best poets and baseball players of our generation caught in the complete and contemptible whoredom of capitalist society
Jack Johnson
At last shaded the sun from his eyes
.A fix
You become fixtures like light
Balls. Drug
Habit
Walter O’Malley, Horace Stoneham, do you suppose somebody fixed Pindar and the Olympic Games?
2.
Golem, Written the Evening After Yom Kippur
Your life does not count. It is the rules of the tribe. No
Your life does not count.
Counting it all does not count. It is the rules of the tribe that your life doesn’t count.
; Numbering it doesn’t count. Madness doesn’t count.
Being mad at the numbers doesn’t count.
It is a rule of the tribe (dead as they are) told over the dead campfires
That it doesn’t count.
That your life doesn’t count.
Countess Death give me Some life in this little plain we live in from start to finish
Let me slit their throats and smash their heads on the
Stone.
3.
I met my death walking down Grant Avenue at four miles an hour,
She said, “I am your death.”
I asked or I sort of asked, “Are you my doom?”
She didn’t know Anglo-Saxon so she coyly repeated, “Isn’t it enough that I am your death? What else should bother us?”
“Doom,” I said. “Doom means judgement in Anglo-Saxon. The Priestess of the dead has a face like whey.”
Whey is the liquid which is left after they spoon off the curds which are good with sugar. The dead do not know judgement.
I am writing this against the Great Mother that lives in the earth and in mysteries I am unable to repeat
Heros take their doom. I will not face
My Death.
4.
Everything is fixed to a point.
The death of a poet or a poem is fixed to a point. This House, that
Bank account, this Piece of paper on the floor. That Light that shines there instead of elsewhere.
Appealing to the better nature of things. Inventing angels.
Inventing angels. The light that that light shone shone there instead of elsewhere. Each corner of the room fixed in an angle to itself.
The death of a poet or a poem or a Piece of paper. Things
Fix themselves.
5.
Give up. The Delphic oracle was fixed by the Persians. Pindar
Pindar
Was a publicity man for some princes. Traded
For a couple of wrestlers and cash, Anger
Does not purify.
The very words I write
Do not purify. Are fixed in the language evolved by thousands of generations of these princes—used mainly for commerce Meretriciousness.
Wrestler Plato tried to make them all into stars. Stars are not what they are.
Coining a phrase our words are
Big-fake-twenty-dollar-gold-pieces.
6.
He died from killing himself. His public mask was broken because
He no longer had a public mask.
People retrieved his poems from wastebaskets. They had
Long hearts.
Oh, what a pain and shame was his passing
People returned to their business somewhat saddened.
MAP POEMS (1963–1964)
111
Baudelaire country. Heat. Hills without gold. Astonishment that anything has happened to the right or left of it.
Ranches built on hopes that the families of the ranches have long since forgotten.
Valley in the sense of valley where you can’t see the mountains from which the waters in the not terribly cold winter once cold have eventually poured through.
Doubt.
137
Little men from outer space and creatures who eat frogs. Tourist hotel since 1900 for tourists seeking wonder.
Below it on all sides is a railroad which never climbs Mt. Shasta.
If they have hidden away anything it is here. But lower, where you can go, there are frenzied deer, escaping you and the hidden monsters.
An oligarchy of love.
155
Always a river at your back. Dead coalminers. The earth comes to the surface here.
Impermanence and fortitude.
The long cattle grazing in hills that are too short for them and the grapes that do not quite seem happy being grapes where they are. Too close to the earth.
Port of Stockton, one hundred million miles from China.
185
A bridge to what, you ask. There is not a bridge on the map. Is this all not composed of sand-dunes.
The lights flicker from the sand-dunes of Golden Gate Park to the sand-dunes of San Rafael over a bay which was once a sand-dune.
No coast line only trees to anchor it.
The orange-colored highways fall apart in your hand.
217
“I have found it,” he said, as he slipped on the soap in his bathtub.
A harbor that was never quite a harbor, near gold that was never quite gold, and the redwoods always retreating lumbering away from human foolishness.
“What have you found?” I have found nothing. A fishing boat and a lumber boat and a few men on a hill the trees just left panning a little gold.
Love makes the discovery wisdom abandons.
LANGUAGE (1963-1965)
THING LANGUAGE
This ocean, humiliating in its disguises
Tougher than anything.
No one listens to poetry. The ocean
Does not mean to be listened to. A drop
Or crash of water. It means
Nothing.
It
Is bread and butter
Pepper and salt. The death
That young men hope for. Aimlessly
It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No
One listens to poetry.
Sporting Life
The trouble with comparing a poet with a radio is that radios don’t develop scar tissue. The tubes burn out, or with a transistor, which most souls are, the battery or diagram burns out replaceable or not replaceable, but not like that punchdrunk fighter in the bar. The poet
Takes too many messages. The right to the ear that floored him in New Jersey. The right to say that he stood six rounds with a champion.
Then they sell beer or go on sporting commissions, or, if the scar tissue is too heavy, demonstrate in a bar where the invisible champions might not have hit him. Too many of them.
The poet is a radio. The poet is a liar. The poet is a counterpunching radio.
And those messages (God would not damn them) do not even know they are champions.
I hear a banging on the door of the night
Buzz, buzz; buzz, buzz; buzz, buzz
If you open the door does it let in light?
Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz; buzz, buzzz.
If the day appears like a yellow raft
Meow, meow; meow, meoww
Is it really on top of a yellow giraffe
Meow, meow, meow, meow. Meow, meow
If the door caves in as the darkness slides
Knocking and knocking; knock, knock, knock
What can tell the light of whatever’s inside?
Knocking and knocking; knock, knock, knock
Or the light and the darkness dance in your eye
Shadows falling one by one
Pigs, and eels, and open sky
Dancers falling one by one
Dancers shrieking one by one.
Baseball Predictions, April 1, 1964
National League
American League
1. Philadelphia
2. Los Angeles
3. Houston by
4. San Francisco
5. Milwaukee
6. St. Louis
7. Cincinnati
8. Pittsburgh
9. Chicago
10. New York
1. President DeGaulle
will be assassinated
by a Communist named
John Foster Oswald before
the Yankees clinch
the pennant.
The log in the fire
Asks a lot
When it is lighted
Or knot
Timber comes
From seas mainly
Sometimes burns green
-Ly
When it is lighted
The knot
Burns like a joke
With the color of smoke
Save us, wit
h birthdays, whatever is in the fire or not in the fire,
immortal
We cannot be
A chimney tree
Or give grace to what’s mere-Ly fatal.
Finally the messages penetrate
There is a corpse of an image—they penetrate
The corpse of a radio. Cocteau used a car radio on account of NO SPEED LIMIT. In any case the messages penetrate the radio and render it (and the radio) ultimately useless.
Prayer
Is exactly that
The kneeling radio down to the tomb of some saint
Uselessness sung and danced (the radio dead but alive it can connect things
Into sound. Their prayer
Its only connection.
Heros eat soup like anyone else. Sometimes the kitchen is so far away
That there is no soup. No kitchen. An open space of ground recovered by
The sky.
Heros eat soup like anyone else. False ground.
Soup
Of the evening
Beautiful soup.
And the sky stays there not an image
But the heros
Like the image of an image
(What is made of soup from)
Zooms.
Smoke signals
Like in the Eskimo villages on the coast where the earthquake hit
Bang, snap, crack. They will never know what hit them
On the coast of Alaska. They expect everybody to be insane.
This is a poem about the death of John F. Kennedy.
A redwood forest is not invisible at night. The blackness covers it but it covers the blackness.
If they had turned Jeffers into a parking lot death would have been eliminated and birth also. The lights shine 24 hours a day on a parking lot.
True conservation is the effort of the artist and the private man to keep things true. Trees and the cliffs in Big Sur breathe in the dark. Jeffers knew the pain of their breath and the pain was the death of a first-born baby breathing.