by Jack Spicer
Your voice consisted of sounds that I had
To route to phonemes, then to bound and free morphemes, then to syntactic structures. Telekinesis
Would not have been possible even if we were sitting at the same table. Long
Distance calls your father, your mother, your friend, your lover. The lips
Are never quite as far away as when you kiss.
An electric system.
“GK. , amber, also shining metal; allied to , gleaming.”
Malice aforethought. Every sound
You can make making music.
Tough lips.
This is no nightingale. No-Body’s waxen image burned. Only
Believe me. Linguistics is divided like Graves’ mythology of mythology, a triple goddess—morphology, phonology, and syntax.
Tough lips that cannot quite make the sounds of love
The language
Has so misshaped them.
Malicious afterthought. None of you bastards
Knows how Charlie Parker died. And dances now in some brief kingdom (Oz) two phonemes
That were never paired before in the language.
Aleph did not come before Beth. The Semitic languages kept as strict a separation between consonant and vowel as between men and women. Vowels somehow got between to produce children. J V H
Was male. The Mycenaean bookkeepers
Mixed them up (one to every 4.5) (A=1, E=5, I=9, O=15, U=21)
Alpha being chosen as the queen of the alphabet because she meant “not.”
Punched IBM cards follow this custom.
What I have chosen to follow is what schoolteachers call a blend, but which is not, since the sounds are very little changed by each other
Two consonants (floating in the sea of some truth together)
Immediately preceded and/or followed by a vowel.
The emotional disturbance echoes down the canyons of the heart.
Echoes there—sounds cut off—merely phonemes. A ground-rules double. You recognize them by pattern. Try.
Hello shouted down a canyon becomes huhluh. You, and the canyons of the heart,
Recognize feebly what you shouted. The vowels
Are indistinguishable. The consonants
A pattern for imagination. Phonemes,
In the true sense, that are dead before their burial. Constructs
Of the imagination
Of the real canyon and the heart’s
Construct.
GRAPHEMICS
1.
Like a scared rabbit running over and over again his tracks in the snow
We spent this Halloween together, forty miles apart.
The tracks are there and the rabbit’s feeling of death is there.
And the children no longer masquerading themselves as ghosts but as businessmen, yelled “Trick or treat,” maybe even in Stinson
The tracks in the snow and the rabbit’s motion which writes it is quite legible. The children
Not even pretending to be souls of the dead are not. Forty miles. Nothing really restored
We
And the dead are not really on the frozen field. (The children don’t even wear masks) This
Is another poem about the death of John F. Kennedy.
2.
It’s been raining five days and will probably keep raining five days more
I get up in the morning, see the treacherous sun and try to read the Indian signs on the pavement. Not much water. Has it been raining while I dreamed?
The sky is no help. The clouds are to the east and the sky (treacherous blue) is no help. It is going to rain from the west.
Nevertheless (while the wind is blowing from the west) I can smell the clouds that won’t appear—but will for five or ten days. Your heart, and the sky has a hole in it.
In my heart, as Verlaine said, I can hear the little sound of it raining
Not an Indian sign. But real unfucking rain.
3.
Let us tie the strings on this bit of reality.
Graphemes. Once wax now plastic, showing the ends. Like a red light.
One feels or sees limits.
They are warning graphemes but also meaning graphemes because without the marked ends of the shoelace or the traffic signal one would not know how to tie a shoe or cross a street—which is like making a sentence.
Crossing a street against the light or tying a shoe with a granny knot is all right. Freedom, in fact, providing one sees or feels the warning graphemes. Let them snarl at you then and you snarl back at them. You’ll be dead sooner
But so will they. They
Disappear when you die.
4.
The sun-dial makes a grapheme I cannot understand. Even in winter it is accurate. The shadow
And the sun in exact proportions.
The hour-glass is a computer. It measures (whether or not there ever has been any any sun), how many grains of sand have started at the top and gone, willy-nilly, to the bottom.
Graphemes are voluntary. The sun does not have to hit your face or your face the sun. Your shadow, if you and the sun and willing
Will tell time.
It will spread across the grass at exactly the right intervals, neither of you caring.
The imaginary hour-glass is my enemy, sun-dial,
And yours.
5.
You turn red and green like a traffic light. And in between them orange—a real courting color. Neither
The pedestrian or the driver knows whether he is going to hit the other. Orange
Being a courting color
Doesn’t last long. The pedestrian
And the driver go back to the red and green colors of their existence. Unhit
Or hit (it hardly matters.)
When we walked through the Broadway tunnel I showed you signs above green lights which said “ON A RED LIGHT STOP YOUR CAR AND TURN OFF YOUR IGNITION.” On an orange light—
But their was not an orange light
In the whole tunnel.
6.
You flicker,
If I move my finger through a candleflame, I know that there is nothing there. But if I hold my finger there a few minutes longer,
It blisters.
This is an act of will and the flame is is not really there for the candle, I
Am writing my own will.
Or does the flame cast shadows?
At Hiroshima, I hear, the shadows of the victims were as if photographed into concrete building blocks.
Or does it flicker? Or are we both candles and fingers?
Or do they both point us to the grapheme on the concrete wall—
The space between it
Where the shadow and the flame are one?
7.
Walden Pond
All those noxious gases rising from it in the summer. In the winter ice
Dirty now. Almost as dirty as the snow in Boston.
W.P.A. swimming hole. Erected
By the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
We saw the lights across the pond. They said that there was some sort of being across the pond, drinking dry martinis like we were.
We made tapes. They were probably erased like we were.
Figures on the pond’s surface.
And yet the water like a piece of paper moved and moves
Restlessly while memory gives the light
From the other side.
8.
I am I—both script i and cursive i. Rolled into one rug, one grapheme from whose colors stem, phonemes, morphemes, unusual birds. Even—if you put a dot or dash with it: syntactic structures.
In between
The spaces on a paper the letters grow like palm-trees in a cold wind
I—
lands of thought within thought within thought. Those cold spaces.
I within I within i etc.
Flowering, all-one. Ein
Eichenbach steht einsam. Old
Senses in new thongs
.
9.
There is a new German 50 pfennig postage stamp (a grapheme to be paid for and cancelled)
That shows a chapel and an oak tree
And the oak tree looks like a picture of Hitler.
Graphemes should not be looked at so minutely. The
Forest for the trees. The kisses for the love. The
Oakman grows behind every chapel.
The fine
Print on the contract.
God gives us that. The Bundespost Reichsminister says that the issue will continued. “I know what I designed and it’s not a countenance of Hitler. It doesn’t speak very well for the German people if they see Hitler everywhere.”
10.
Love is not mocked whatever use you put to it. Words are also not mocked.
The soup of real turtles flows through our veins. Being a [poet] a disyllable in a world of monosyllables. Awakened by the distance between the [o] and the [e]
The earth quakes. John F. Kennedy is assassinated. The dark forest of words lets in some light from its branches.
Mocking them, the deep leaves
That time leaves us
Words, loves.
BOOK OF MAGAZINE VERSE (1965)
TWO POEMS FOR THE NATION
1.
Pieces of the past arising out of the rubble. Which evokes Eliot and then evokes Suspicion. Ghosts all of them. Doers of no good.
The past around us is deeper than.
Present events defy us, the past
Has no such scruples. No funeral processions for him. He died in agony. The cock under the thumb.
Rest us as corpses
We poets
Vain words.
For a funeral (as I live and breathe and speak)
Of good
And impossible
Dimensions.
2.
These big trucks drive and in each one
There is a captain of poetry or a captain of love or a captain of sex. A company
In which there is no vice-president.
You see them first as a kid when you’re hitch-hiking and they were not as big or as final. They sometimes stopped for a hitch-hiker although you had to run.
Now they move down the freeway in some mocking kind of order. The
First truck is going to be passed by the seventh. The distance
Between where they are going and where you are standing cannot be measured.
The road-captains, heartless and fast-moving
Know
SIX POEMS FOR POETRY CHICAGO
1.
“Limon tree very pretty
And the limon flower is sweet
But the fruit of the poor lemon
Is impossible to eat”
In Riverside we saved the oranges first (by smudging) and left the lemons last to fend for themselves. They didn’t usually
A no good crop. Smudge-pots
Didn’t rouse them. The music
Is right though. The lemon tree
Could branch off into real magic. Each flower in place. We
Were sickened by the old lemon.
2.
Pieces of the past arising out of the rubble. Which evokes Eliot and then evokes Suspicion. Ghosts all of them. Doers of no good.
The past around us is deeper than.
Present events defy us, the past
Has no such scruples. No funeral processions for him. He died in agony. The cock under the thumb.
Rest us as corpses
We poets
Vain words.
For a funeral (as I live and breathe and speak)
Of good
And impossible
Dimensions.
3.
In the far, fat Vietnamese jungles nothing grows.
In Guadalcanal nothing grew but a kind of shrubbery that was like the bar-conversation of your best friend who was not able to talk. 3
Sheets to the wind. No
Wind being present.
No
Lifeboats being present. A jungle
Can’t use life-boats. Dead
From whatever bullets the snipers were. Each
Side of themselves. Safe-Ly delivered.
4.
The rind (also called the skin) of the lemon is difficult to understand
It goes around itself in an oval quite unlike the orange which, as anyone can tell, is a fruit easily to be eaten.
It can be crushed in canneries into all sorts of extracts which are still not lemons. Oranges have no such fate. They’re pretty much the same as they were. Culls become frozen orange juice. The best oranges are eaten.
It’s the shape of the lemon, I guess that causes trouble. It’s ovalness, it’s rind. This is where my love, somehow, stops.
5.
A moment’s rest. I can’t get a moment’s rest without sleeping with you. Yet each moment
Seems so hard to figure. Clocks
Tell time. In elaborate ceremonial they tick the seconds off what was to come.
Wake us at six in the morning with messages someone had given them the night before.
To pierce the darkness you need a clock that tells good time. Something in the morning to hold on to
As one gets craftier in poetry one sees the obvious messages (cocks for clocks) but one forgets the love that gave them
Time.
6.
The moment’s rest. And the bodies entangled and yet not entangled in sleeping. Could we get
Out of our skins and dance? The bedclothes
So awry that they seem like two skins.
Or all the sorts of skins that we wore, wear (the orgasm), wanted to wear, or would be wearing. So utterly tangled. A bad dream.
A moment’s rest. The skins
All of them
Near.
I saw the ghost of myself and the ghost of yourself dancing without music.
With
Out
Skin.
A good dream. The
Moment’s rest.
THREE POEMS FOR TISH
1.
There is a mind beating in that pile of rubble you call your mind.
It occasionally astonished me.
“Etonez moi” said Diaghilef to Nijinsky. Who immediately did and went crazy. A crazy notion in a gray society.
What you hear is what you have heard from. What you wish is what someone has wished from a great distance. A long line with no bait and a single hook.
Nijinsky danced nice. He was
The Spectre Of The Rose. (I am not sure who is Diagalef and who is Nijinsky.) But the both of them also died.
2.
It was not desire but your shivering moved me. Perhaps desire too around
Ten above freezing.
I thought of the birds in Canada who fly fecklessly through snow-clouds and you were a trembling bird nestling
In the palm of my hand.
You weren’t and I thought of all the snow-geese (if there are such things) freezing in the Arctic wind. You seemed then more like a sparrow
Eating the last grains they can find in the snow.
30 below in the hand you were clasped by and the hand you were clasping.
A problem with sparrows.
3.
You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. Telemachus sad
Over his father’s shortcomings. By now
None of the islands exist where he visited
The horse, lead or not lead to water is still there. Refusing
Bare sustenence.
Each of us has inside of him that horse-animal
Refusing the best streams or as if their thick water flowing were refusing us. After
Miles and miles of this, horse and rider,
What do you say? How come
Love isn’t as great as it should be?
And Plato’s black and white horses in the Phaedrus. You can
Lead a horse to water.
FOUR POEMS FOR
RAMPARTS
1.
Get those words out of your mouth and into your heart. If there isn’t
A God don’t believe in Him. “Credo
Quia absurdum,” creates wars and pointless loves and was even in Tertullian’s time a heresy. I see him like a tortoise creeping through a vast desert of unbelief.
“The shadows of love are not the shadows of God.”
This is the second heresy created by the first Piltdown man in Plato’s cave. Either
The fire casts a shadow or it doesn’t.
Red balloons, orange balloons, purple balloons all cast off together into a raining sky.
The sky where men weep for men. And above the sky a moon or an astronaut smiles on television. Love
for God or man transformed to distance.
This is the third heresy. Dante
Was the first writer of science-fiction. Beatrice
Shimmering in infinite space.
2.
A pope almost dying of hiccups. Or St. Peter
Telling the police, “Honest to God I don’t know this man,” until the cock crowed three times and they released him. “A rock
Upon which I will build a church.”
And yet it’s there. Accepting divinity as Jesus accepted humanness. Grudgingly, without passion, but the most important point to see in the world.
We do not quite believe this. God is palpably untrue. Things spreading over the universe like lessons.
But Jesus dies and comes back again with holes in his hands. Like the weather,
And is, I hope, to be reached, and is something to pray to
And is the Son of God.
3.
In the red dawn of the Apocalypse (St. John’s not the Defense Department’s) I can hear the soldiers moving. Pope John