by Jack Spicer
Death is not final. Only parking lots.
The whorship of beauty
Or beautiful things take a long time getting used to.
There is no past in beauty. The car going at 97.5 miles an hour.
The time changes
As you cross each border.
Daffodils, ceremonies of spring, sprang, sprung
And it is August
Another century.
Take each past, combine it with its present. Death
Is a tooth among
Strangers.
It comes May and the summers renew themselves
(39 of them) Baseball seasons
Utter logic
Where a man is faced with a high curve.
No telling what happened in this game. Except one didn’t strike out. One feels they fielded it badly at second base.
Oceans of wildflowers. Utter logic of the form and color.
Thanatos, the death-plant in the skull
Grows wings and grows enormous.
The herb of the whole system.
Systematically blotting out the anise weed and the trap-door spider of the vacant lot.
Worse than static or crabgrass.
Thanatos, bone at the bottom, Saint
Francis, that botanist in Santa Rosa
(Bless me now, for I am a plant and an animal)
Called him Brother Death.
1st SF Home Rainout Since. Bounce Tabby-Cat Giants. Newspapers
Left in my house.
My house is Aquarius. I don’t believe
The water-bearer
Has equal weight on his shoulders.
The lines never do.
We give equal
Space to everything in our lives. Eich- Mann
proved that false in killing like you raise wildflowers.
Witlessly
I
Can-
not
accord
sympathy
to
those
who
do
not
recognize
The human crisis.
The country is not very well defined.
Whether they are bat-people or real people. The sea-Coast of Bohemia. The in-Visible world.
A man counts his fingers in these situations. Whether there are five or ten of them or udders as we might go sea-bathing in dream.
But dream is not enough. We waking hear the call of the
In-Visible world
Not seen. Hinted at only. By some vorpals, some sea-lions, some scraggs.
Almost too big to get used to, its dimensions amaze us, who are blind to Whatever
Is rising and falling with us.
I squint my eyes to cry
(No tears, a barren salt-mine) and then take two sniffles through my nose
This means emotion. Chaplinesque
As the fellow says.
We pantomime every action of our bodies
Do not wait
On one sad hill
For one sad turn. I’ve had it
Principly because you’re young.
The metallurgical analysis of the stone that was my heart shows an alarming percentage of silicon.
Silicon, as George would be the first to tell you, is not a metal. It is present in glass, glue and since glue is made from horses—living substance.
I love you. But as the iron clangs, the glass, the glue, the living substance (which, God knows, has been to as many glue factories as it can remember) muffles what the rest of the heart says.
I see you cowering in the corner and the metal in my heart bangs. Too personal
The glass and glue in my heart reply. And they are living substance.
You cannot bake glass in a pie or fry glue in an omelette
“If I speak in the tongue of men and angels . . .”
The sounding brass of my heart says
“Love.”
LOVE POEMS
1.
Do the flowers change as I touch your skin?
They are merely buttercups. No sign of death in them. They die and you know by their death that it is no longer summer. Baseball season.
Actually
I don’t remember ever touching your back when there were flowers (buttercups and dandelions there) waiting to die. The end of summer
The baseball season finished. The
Bumble-bee there cruising over a few poor flowers.
They have cut the ground from under us. The touch
Of your hands on my back. The Giants
Winning 93 games
Is as impossible
In spirit
As the grass we might walk on.
2.
For you I would build a whole new universe around myself.
This isn’t shit it is poetry. Shit
Enters into it only as an image. The shit the ghostes feasted on in the Odyssey. When Odysseus gave them one dry fly and made them come up for something important Food.
“For you I would build a whole new universe,” the ghosts all cried, starving.
3.
“ ‘Arf,’ says Sandy”
“To come to the moment of never come back to the moment of hope. Too many buses that are late” Hugh O’Neill in our Canto for Ezra Pound.
The ground still squirming. The ground still not fixed as I thought it would be in an adult world.
Sandy growls like a wolf. The space between him and his image is greater than the space between me and my image.
Throw him a honey-cake. Hell has been proved to be a series of image.
Death is a dog and Little Orphan Annie
My own Eurydice. Going into hell so many times tears it
Which explains poetry.
4.
“If you don’t believe in a god, don’t quote him,” Valery once said when he was about ready to give up poetry. The purposefull suspension of disbelief has about the chance of a snowball in hell.
Lamias maybe, or succubi but they are about as real in California as night-crawlers
Gods or stars or totems are not game-animals. Snark-hunting is not like discussing baseball.
Against wisdom as such. Such
Tired wisdoms as the game-hunters develop
Shooting Zeus, Alpha Centauri, wolf with the same toy gun.
It is deadly hard to worship god, star, and totem. Deadly easy
To use them like worn-out condoms spattered by your own gleeful, crass, and unworshiping
Wisdom
5.
Which explains poetry. Distances
Impossible to be measured or walked over. A band of faggots (fasces) cannot be built into a log-cabin in which all Western Civilization can cower. And look at stars, and books, and other people’s magic diligently.
Distance, Einstein said, goes around in circles. This
Is the opposite of a party or a social gathering.
It does not give much distance to go on.
As
In the beaches of California
It does not give me much to go on.
The tidal swell
Particle and wave
Wave and particle
Distances.
6.
Sable arrested a fine comb.
It is not for the ears. Hearing
Merely prevents progress. Take a step back and view the sentence.
Sable arrested a fine comb. On the road to Big Sur (1945) the fuses blew every time we braked. Lights out, every kind of action. A deer
Hit us once (1945) and walked sulkily into the bushes as we braked into silence.
No big white, lightless automobiles for him. If he’s hit, let them show him.
Sable arrested a last stop . . . I think it was in Watsonville (1945 sable arrested fine comb a)
Past danger into the fog we
Used the last fuse.
7.
The howling dog in my mind says “Surrender” at eight points of the compass. North, So
uth, East, West, combinations.
Whether
He means me or you to me I am not certain. A color-blind person can read signals because red is always at the top and green at the bottom. Or is it the reverse? I forget, not being color-blind. The dog
In my heart howls continuously at you, at me. “Surrender.”
I do not know where my heart is.
My heart’s in the highlands
My heart is not here
My heart’s in the highlands
A-chasing the deer. Dog
Of my heart groans, howls
Blind to guesses. The deer
Your heart and guesses, blandly seek water.
8.
There is real pain in not having you just as there is real pain in not having poetry
Not totally in either case as solace, solution, end to all the minor tragedies
But, in either case (poetry or you)
As a bed-partner.
Against the drift of rhododendrons and other images we have not seen together
I have seen your locked lips and come home sweating.
9.
For you I would build a whole new universe but you obviously find it cheaper to rent one. Eurydice did too. She went back to hell unsure of what kind of other house Orpheus would build. “I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.” Shot
In the back by an arrow, President Kennedy seemed to stiffen for a moment before he assumed his place in history. Eros
Do that.
I gave you my imaginary hand and you give me your imaginary hand and we walk together (in imagination) over the earthly ground.
INTERMISSIONS
Intermission I
“The movement of the earth brings harmes and fears.
Men wonder what it is and what it meant.”
Donne
In the next line
Contrasts this with “the celestial movement of the spheres.”
Rhyme soothes. And in a book I read in college fifteen years ago it said that this was an attack on the Copernican theory and a spidery hand had penciled in the margin “Earthquake.”
Where is the poet? A-keeping the sheep
A-keeping the celestial movement of the spheres in a long, boring procession
A-center of gravity
A-(while the earthquakes of happiness go on inside and outside his body and the stars in their courses stop to notice)
Sleep.
Intermission II
The Wizards of Oz have all gone kook
There are no unidentified flying objects. The
Moon may not be made of green cheese but my heart is. Across the Deadly Desert We found a champion. The poem
Which does not last as long as a single hand touches.
Morning comes. And the signs of life
(My morning had a telegraph key at here)
Are less vivid. There is a long trail in the back country. Choose
Carefully your victim.
Around the campsite we argued who would choose the fire
I left in a huff with your hand
Naked.
Intermission III
Stay there on the edge of no cliff. With no conceivable future but progress—long, flat mesa-country. A few sheep you will hold for the rest of your life. Rimbaud’s lover
Who had tears fall on his heart or some sweet message.
Dare he
Write poetry
Who has no taste of acid on his tongue
Who carrys his dreams on his back like a packet?
Ghosts of other poets send him shame
He will be alive (as they are dead)
At the final picking.
TRANSFORMATIONS
Transformations I
They say “he need (present) enemy (plural)”
I am not them. This is the first transformation.
They say “we need (present) no enemy (singular)” No enemy in the universe is theirs worth having. We is an intimate pronoun which shifts its context almost as the I blinks at it. Those
Swans we saw in the garden coming out of the water we hated them. “Out of place,” you said in passing. Those swans and I (a blink in context), all out of place we hated you.
He need (present) enemy (plural) and now it is the swans and me against you
Everything out of place
(And now another blink of moment) the last swan back in place. We
Hated them.
Transformations II
“In Scarlet Town where I was born
There was a fair maid dwelling.”
We make up a different language for poetry
And for the heart—ungrammatical.
It is not that the name of the town changes
(Scarlet becomes Charlotte or even in Gold City I once heard a good Western singer make it Tonapah. We don’t have towns here)
(That sort of thing would please the Jungian astronauts)
But that the syntax changes. This is older than towns.
Troy was a baby when Greek sentence structure emerged. This was the real Trojan Horse.
The order changes. The Trojans
Having no idea of true or false syntax and having no recorded language
Never knew what hit them.
Transformations III
This is the melancholy Dane
That built all the houses that lived in the lane
Across from the house that Jack built.
This is the maiden all forlorn, a crumpled cow with a crumpled horn Who lived in the house that Jack built.
This is the crab-god shiny and bright who sunned by day and wrote by night and lived in the house that Jack built.
This is the end of it, very dear friend, this is the end of us.
MORPHEMICS
1.
Morphemes in section
Lew, you and I know how love and death matter
Matter as wave and particle—twins
At the same business.
No excuse for them. Lew, thanatos and agape have no business being there.
What is needed is hill country. Dry in August. Dead grass leading to mountains you can climb onto
Or stop
Morphemes in section
Dead grass. The total excuse for love and death
2.
The faded-blond out beauty
Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I forget you Zion.
There we wept
He gave me a turn. Re-
Membering his body. By the waters of Babylon
In a small boat the prince of all the was to come
Floating peacefully. Us exiles dancing on the banks of their fucking river.
They asked us to sing a sad song How
Motherfucker can I sing a sad song
When I remember Zion? Alone
Like the stone they say Osiris was when he came up dancing.
How can I sing my Lord’s song in a strange land?
3.
Moon,
cantilever of sylabbles
If it were spelled “mune” it would not cause madness.
Un-Worldly. Put
Your feet on the ground. Mon-Ey doesn’t grow on trees. Great
Knocker of the present shape of things. A tide goes past like wind.
No normal growth like a tree the moon stays there
And its there is our where
“Where are you going, pretty maid?”
“I’m going milking, sir,” she said.
Our image shrinks to a morpheme, an -ing word. Death
Is an image of sylables.
4.
The loss of innocence, Andy,
The morpheme—cence is regular as to Rule IIc, IIa and IIb [cents] and [sense] being more regular. The [inn-]
With its geminated consonant
Is not the inn in which the Christ Child was born. The root is nocere and innocence, I guess, means not hurtful. Innocents
The beasts would talk to them (Alice in the
woods with the faun). While to Orpheus
They would only listen. Innocuous
Comes from the same root. The trees
Of some dark forest where we wander amazed at the selves of ourselves. Stumbling. Roots
Stay. You cannot lose your innocence, Andy
Nor could Alice. Nor could anyone
Given the right woods.
PHONEMICS
No love deserves the death it has. An archipelago
Rocks cropping out of ocean. Seabirds shit on it. Live out their lives on it.
What was once a mountain.
Or was it once a mountain? Did Lemuria, Atlantis, Mu ever exist except in the minds of old men fevered by the distances and the rocks they saw?
Was it true? Can the ocean of time claim to own us now adrift
Over that land. In that land. If memory serves
There (that rock out there)
Is more to it.
Wake up one warm morning. See the sea in the distance.
Die Ferne, water
Because mainly it is not land. A hot day too
The shreads of fog have already vaporized
Have gone back where they came from. There may be a whale in this ocean.
Empty fragments, like the shards of pots found in some Mesopotamian expedition. Found but not put together. The unstable
Universe has distance but not much else.
No one’s weather or room to breathe in.
On the tele-phone (distant sound) you sounded no distant than if you were talking to me in San Francisco on the telephone or in a bar or in a room. Long
Distance calls. They break sound
Into electrical impulses and put it back again. Like the long telesexual route to the brain or the even longer teleerotic route to the heart. The numbers dialed badly, the connection faint.