My Vocabulary Did This to Me Read online

  3. What insect do you most resemble? __________________________________

  4. What star do you most resemble? ___________________________________

  5. What card of the ordinary playing-card deck (or Tarot deck) represents

  the absolute of your desires? _________________________________________

  the absolute of your fears? ___________________________________________

  6. Write the funniest joke that you know.

  VI. PRACTICE

  ANSWER EITHER OR BOTH QUESTION 1 AND 2

  1. In any of the three following poems fill in each of the blanks with any number of words you wish (including none) attempting to make a complete and satisfactory poem. Do not alter any of the existing words or punctuation or increase the number of lines.

  2. Invent a dream in which you appear as a poet.

  I

  With the gums gone . . . . . . . .

  are . . . . . . And though the nose is . . . . . nothing,

  the eye . . . . . .

  And now the . . . . .

  Of the radiator . . . . . floor

  is . . . . . , the even row of it

  fit to raise

  . . . . . children.

  You will count . . . . .

  You will stay in the midst of them,

  You will know . . . . . , you will hear them

  in the narrow . . . . . .

  II

  In . . . . . . . . . . . . endlessness

  Snow, . . . . . . . . . . . . salt

  He lost his . . . . . . . . . .

  The color white. He walks

  Over a . . . . . . . . . . . . carpet made

  . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  Without eyes or thumbs

  He suffers . . . . . . . . . .

  But the . . . . . . . . . . quiver

  In the . . . . . . . . . . endlessness

  How . . . . . . . . . . a wound

  His . . . . . . . . . . left.

  Snow, . . . . . . . . . . salt . . . . . . . . . .

  In the . . . . . . . . . . endlessness.

  III

  Blue-rooted heron, . . . . . . . . . . . . lake

  . . . . . . . . . song, like me no traveler

  Taking . . . . . . . . . rest, loose-winged water-bird

  And dumb with music . . . . . . . . . .

  I stand upon the waterfront, like him no traveler

  . . . . . . . . . , dangling on . . . . . . . . . wings.

  Aching for flight, for . . . . . . . . .

  I . . . . . . .. . and take my rest.

  They will not hunt us . . . . . . . . .

  The flesh of the . . . . . . . . is . . . . . . . and is dumb.

  The sound of an arrow, the sight of a hunter

  . . . . . . . . . . . life without wings.

  So let us die for death alone is motion

  And death alone will make these herons fly.

  . . . . . . . . . wingless . . . . . . . . . ocean

  . . . . . . . . . die.

  AFTER LORCA (1957)

  With an Introduction by Federico García Lorca

  Introduction

  Frankly I was quite surprised when Mr. Spicer asked me to write an introduction to this volume. My reaction to the manuscript he sent me (and to the series of letters that are now a part of it) was and is fundamentally unsympathetic. It seems to me the waste of a considerable talent on something which is not worth doing. However, I have been removed from all contact with poetry for the last twenty years. The younger generation of poets may view with pleasure Mr. Spicer’s execution of what seems to me a difficult and unrewarding task.

  It must be made clear at the start that these poems are not translations. In even the most literal of them Mr. Spicer seems to derive pleasure in inserting or substituting one or two words which completely change the mood and often the meaning of the poem as I had written it. More often he takes one of my poems and adjoins to half of it another half of his own, giving rather the effect of an unwilling centaur. (Modesty forbids me to speculate which end of the animal is mine.) Finally there are an almost equal number of poems that I did not write at all (one supposes they must be his) executed in a somewhat fanciful imitation of my early style. The reader is given no indication which of the poems belong to which category, and I have further complicated the problem (with malice aforethought I must admit) by sending Mr. Spicer several poems written after my death which he has also translated and included here. Even the most faithful student of my work will be hard put to decide what is and what is not García Lorca as, indeed, he would if he were to look into my present resting place. The analogy is impolite, but I fear the impoliteness is deserved.

  The letters are another problem. When Mr. Spicer began sending them to me a few months ago, I recognized immediately the “programmatic letter”—the letter one poet writes to another not in any effort to communicate with him, but rather as a young man whispers his secrets to a scarecrow, knowing that his young lady is in the distance listening. The young lady in this case may be a Muse, but the scarecrow nevertheless quite naturally resents the confidences. The reader, who is not a party to this singular tryst, may be amused by what he overhears.

  The dead are notoriously hard to satisfy. Mr. Spicer’s mixture may please his contemporary audience or may, and this is more probable, lead him to write better poetry of his own. But I am strongly reminded as I survey this curious amalgam of a cartoon published in an American magazine while I was visiting your country in New York. The cartoon showed a gravestone on which were inscribed the words: “HERE LIES AN OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN.” The caption below it read: “I wonder how they happened to be buried in the same grave?”

  Federico García Lorca

  Outside Granada, October 1957

  Juan Ramón Jimenez

  A Translation for John Ryan

  In the white endlessness

  Snow, seaweed, and salt

  He lost his imagination.

  The color white. He walks

  Upon a soundless carpet made

  Of pigeon feathers.

  Without eyes or thumbs

  He suffers a dream not moving

  But the bones quiver.

  In the white endlessness

  How pure and big a wound

  His imagination left.

  Snow, seaweed, and salt. Now

  In the white endlessness.

  Ballad of the Little Girl Who Invented the Universe

  A Translation for George Stanley

  Jasmine flower and a bull with his throat slashed.

  Infinite sidewalk. Map. Room. Harp. Sunrise.

  A little girl pretends a bull made of jasmine

  And the bull is a bloody twilight that bellows.

  If the sky could be a little boy

  The jasmines could take half the night to themselves

  And the bull a blue bullring of his own

  With his heart at the foot of a small column.

  But the sky is an elephant

  And the jasmines are water without blood

  And the little girl is a bouquet of night flowers

  Lost on a big dark sidewalk.

  Between the jasmine and the bull

  Or the hooks of the sleeping people of marble or

  In the jasmine, clouds and an elephant—

  The skeleton of a little girl turning.

  Dear Lorca,

  These letters are to be as temporary as our poetry is to be permanent. They will establish the bulk, the wastage that my sour-stomached contemporaries demand to help them swallow and digest the pure word. We will use up our rhetoric here so that it will not appear in our poems. Let it be consumed paragraph by paragraph, day by day, until nothing of it is left in our poetry and nothing of our poetry is left in it. It is precisely because these letters are unnecessary that they must be written.

  In my last letter I spoke of the tradition. The fools that read these letters will think by this we mean what tradition seems to have meant la
tely—an historical patchwork (whether made up of Elizabethan quotations, guide books of the poet’s home town, or obscure bits of magic published by Pantheon) which is used to cover up the nakedness of the bare word. Tradition means much more than that. It means generations of different poets in different countries patiently telling the same story, writing the same poem, gaining and losing something with each transformation—but, of course, never really losing anything. This has nothing to do with calmness, classicism, temperament, or anything else. Invention is merely the enemy of poetry.

  See how weak prose is. I invent a word like invention. These paragraphs could be translated, transformed by a chain of fifty poets in fifty languages, and they still would be temporary, untrue, unable to yield the substance of a single image. Prose invents—poetry discloses.

  A mad man is talking to himself in the room next to mine. He speaks in prose. Presently I shall go to a bar and there one or two poets will speak to me and I to them and we will try to destroy each other or attract each other or even listen to each other and nothing will happen because we will be speaking in prose. I will go home, drunken and dissatisfied, and sleep—and my dreams will be prose. Even the subconscious is not patient enough for poetry.

  You are dead and the dead are very patient.

  Love,

  Jack

  Ballad of the Seven Passages

  A Translation for Ebbe Borregaard

  Rimbaud is spelled with seven letters of the alphabet

  Your heart will never break at what you are hearing

  Rimbaud was older than you are when he was dead

  Your heart will never break at what you are hearing.

  I tell you, darling, beauty was never as old as he was

  And your heart will never break at what you are hearing.

  Shut your mouth.

  Rimbaud is spelled with seven passages

  A E I O U Y

  And that stony vowel called death.

  Oh,

  Damn Rimbaud,

  Beauty is spelled with all the vowels of seven passages.

  Shut your damned mouth.

  When Rimbaud died he became older than your alphabet

  And your heart will never break at what you are hearing.

  Debussy

  A Translation for the University of Redlands

  My shadow moves silently

  Upon the water in the ditch.

  Upon my shadow are the frogs

  Blocked off from the stars.

  The shadow demands from my body

  Unmoving images.

  My shadow skims the water like a huge

  Violet-colored mosquito.

  A hundred crickets try to mine gold

  From the light in the rushes.

  A light born in my heart

  Upon the ditch, reflected.

  Frog

  A Translation for Graham Mackintosh

  Like all the novels I’ve read

  My mind is going to a climax

  And a climax means a splash in the pool.

  Boing. Boing. Boing.

  And your heart is full of water

  And your nose can’t hardly breathe.

  Remember

  How black those pinetrees were that fire burned.

  All that black forest. And the noise

  (Splash)

  Of a single green needle.

  Buster Keaton’s Ride

  A Translation for Melvin Bakkerud

  ROOSTER: Cockledoodledoo!

  (Buster Keaton enters carrying four children in his arms.)

  BUSTER KEATON (takes out a wooden dagger and kills them):

  My poor children!

  ROOSTER: Cockledoodledoo!

  BUSTER KEATON (counting the corpses on the ground): One, two, three, four. (Grabs a bicycle and goes.)

  (Among the old rubber tires and cans of gasoline a Negro eats a straw hat.)

  BUSTER KEATON: What a beautiful afternoon!

  (A parrot flutters around in the sexless sky.)

  BUSTER KEATON: I like riding a bicycle.

  THE OWL: Toowit toowoo.

  BUSTER KEATON: How beautifully these birds sing!

  THE OWL: Hoo!

  BUSTER KEATON: It’s lovely!

  (Pause. Buster Keaton ineffably crosses the rushes and little fields of rye. The landscape shortens itself beneath the wheels of his machine. The bicycle has a single dimension. It is able to enter books and to expand itself even into operas and coalmines. The bicycle of Buster Keaton does not have a riding seat of caramel or sugar pedals like the bicycles bad men ride. It is a bicycle like all bicycles except for a unique drenching of innocence. Adam and Eve run by, frightened as if they were carrying a vase full of water and, in passing, pet the bicycle of Buster Keaton.)

  BUSTER KEATON: Ah, love, love!

  (Buster Keaton falls to the ground. The bicycle escapes him. It runs behind two enormous gray butterflies. It skims madly half an inch from the ground.)

  BUSTER KEATON: I don’t want to talk. Won’t somebody please say something?

  A VOICE: Fool!

  (He continues walking. His eyes, infinite and sad like a newly born animal, dream of lilies and angels and silken belts. His eyes which are like the bottom of a vase. His eyes of a mad child. Which are most faithful. Which are most beautiful. The eyes of an ostrich. His human eyes with a secure equipoise with melancholy. Philadelphia is seen in the distance. The inhabitants of that city now know that the old poem of a Singer machine is able to encircle the big roses of the greenhouse but not at all to comprehend the poetic difference between a bowl of hot tea and a bowl of cold tea. Philadelphia shines in the distance.)

  (An American girl with eyes of celluloid comes through the grass.)

  THE AMERICAN: Hello.

  (Buster Keaton smiles and looks at the shoes of the girl. Those shoes! We do not have to admire her shoes. It would take a crocodile to wear them.)

  BUSTER KEATON: I would have liked—

  THE AMERICAN (breathless): Do you carry a sword decked with myrtle leaves?

  (Buster Keaton shrugs his shoulders and lifts his right foot.)

  THE AMERICAN: Do you have a ring with a poisoned stone?

  (Buster Keaton twists slowly and lifts an inquiring leg.)

  THE AMERICAN: Well?

  (Four angels with wings of a heavenly gas balloon piss among the flowers. The ladies of the town play a piano as if they were riding a bicycle. The waltz, a moon, and seventeen Indian canoes rock the precious heart of our friend. As the greatest surprise of all, autumn has invaded the garden like water explodes a geometrical clump of sugar.)

  BUSTER KEATON (sighing): I would have liked to have been a swan. But I can’t do what I would have liked. Because—What happened to my hat? Where is my collar of little birds and my mohair necktie? What a disgrace!

  (A young girl with a wasp waist and a high collar comes in on a bicycle. She has the head of a nightingale.)

  YOUNG GIRL: Whom do I have the honor of saluting?

  BUSTER KEATON (with a bow): Buster Keaton.

  (The young girl faints and falls off the bicycle. Her legs on the ground tremble like two agonized cobras. A gramophone plays a thousand versions of the same song—“In Philadelphia they have no nightingales.”)

  BUSTER KEATON (kneeling): Darling Miss Eleanor, pardon me! (lower) Darling (lower still) Darling (lowest) Darling.

  (The lights of Philadelphia flicker and go out in the faces of a thousand policemen.)

  Ballad of the Shadowy Pigeons

  A Translation for Joe Dunn

  On the branches of laurel

  Saw two shadowy pigeons.

  One of them was the sun

  The other the moon.

  Little neighbors, I asked them,

  Where am I buried?

  In my tail, said the sun.

  In my craw, said the moon.

  And I who had been walking

  With the earth at my waistline

  Saw two eagles of marble />
  And a naked maiden.

  The one was the other

  And the maiden was no one.

  Little eagles, I asked them,

  Where am I buried?

  In my tail, said the sun.

  In my craw, said the moon.

  On the branches of laurel

  Saw two naked pigeons.

  The one was the other

  And the both of them no one.

  Suicide

  A Translation for Eric Weir

  At ten o’clock in the morning

  The young man could not remember.

  His heart was stuffed with dead wings

  And linen flowers.

  He is conscious that there is nothing left

  In his mouth but one word.

  When he removes his coat soft ashes

  Fall from his arms.

  Through the window he sees a tower

  He sees a window and a tower.

  His watch has run down in its case

  He observes the way it was looking at him.

  He sees his shadow stretched

  Upon a white silk cushion.

  And the stiff geometric youngster

  Shatters the mirror with an ax.

  The mirror submerges everything

  In a great spurt of shadow.

  Bacchus

  A Translation for Don Allen

  An untouched green murmur.

  The figtree wants to extend me its branches.

  Like a panther its shadow

  Stalks my poet shadow.

  The moon has words with the dogs.

  She is mistaken and begins over.

  Yesterday, tomorrow, black, and green

  Troop around my circle of laurel.

  Where would you look for my lifetime

  If I exchanged my heart?

  —And the figtree shouts at me and advances

  Terrible and extended.

  A Diamond

  A Translation for Robert Jones