My Vocabulary Did This to Me Read online

  There is a dead oak tree

  Near a dry river.

  Lady Death, wrinkled,

  Goes looking for custom

  At the heels of a crowd

  Of tenuous phantoms.

  Near the dead oak tree

  Near the dry river

  There is a fair without trumpets

  And tents made of shadow.

  She sells them dry paint

  Made of wax and torture,

  Wicked and twisted

  Like a witch in a story.

  There is a dry river

  There is a hill without grass

  There is a dead oak tree

  Near a dry river.

  The moon

  Is tossing money

  Down through the black air.

  Near the dead oak tree

  Near the dry river

  There is a fair without trumpets

  And tents made of shadow.

  Afternoon

  A Translation for John Barrow

  The sky asks afternoon for a word.

  —“It is 1:36. A black cloud

  Has crossed one of the white clouds.

  13 empty boats

  And a seagull.”

  The bay asks afternoon for a word.

  —“The wind is blowing

  Southwest at nine miles an hour

  I am in love with an ocean

  Whose heart is the color of wet sand.

  At 1:37

  13 empty boats

  And a seagull.”

  Afternoon asks the ocean,

  “Why does a man die?”

  —“It is 1:37

  13 empty boats

  And a seagull.”

  Dear Lorca,

  This is the last letter. The connection between us, which had been fading away with the summer, is now finally broken. I turn in anger and dissatisfaction to the things of my life and you return, a disembodied but contagious spirit, to the printed page. It is over, this intimate communion with the ghost of García Lorca, and I wonder now how it was ever able to happen.

  It was a game, I shout to myself. A game. There are no angels, ghosts, or even shadows. It was a game made out of summer and freedom and a need for a poetry that would be more than the expression of my hatreds and desires. It was a game like Yeats’ spooks or Blake’s sexless seraphim.

  Yet it was there. The poems are there, the memory not of a vision but a kind of casual friendship with an undramatic ghost who occasionally looked through my eyes and whispered to me, not really more important then than my other friends, but now achieving a different level of reality by being missing. Today, alone by myself, it is like having lost a pair of eyes and a lover.

  What is real, I suppose, will endure. Poe’s mechanical chessplayer was not the less a miracle for having a man inside it, and when the man departed, the games it had played were no less beautiful. The analogy is false, of course, but it holds both a promise and a warning for each of us.

  It is October now. Summer is over. Almost every trace of the months that produced these poems has been obliterated. Only explanations are possible, only regrets.

  Saying goodbye to a ghost is more final than saying goodbye to a lover. Even the dead return, but a ghost, once loved, departing will never reappear.

  Love,

  Jack

  Radar

  A Postscript for Marianne Moore

  No one exactly knows

  Exactly how clouds look in the sky

  Or the shape of the mountains below them

  Or the direction in which fish swim.

  No one exactly knows.

  The eye is jealous of whatever moves

  And the heart

  Is too far buried in the sand

  To tell.

  They are going on a journey

  Those deep blue creatures

  Passing us as if they were sunshine

  Look

  Those fins, those closed eyes

  Admiring each last drop of the ocean.

  I crawled into bed with sorrow that night

  Couldn’t touch his fingers. See the splash

  Of the water

  The noisy movement of cloud

  The push of the humpbacked mountains

  Deep at the sand’s edge.

  ADMONITIONS (1957)

  Dear Joe,

  Some time ago I would have thought that writing notes on particular poems would either be a confession that the poems were totally inadequate (a sort of patch put on a leaky tire) or an equally humiliating confession that the writer was more interested in the terrestrial mechanics of criticism than the celestial mechanics of poetry—in either case that the effort belonged to the garage or stable rather than to the Muse.

  Muses do exist, but now I know that they are not afraid to dirty their hands with explication—that they are patient with truth and commentary as long as it doesn’t get into the poem, that they whisper (if you let yourself really hear them), “Talk all you want, baby, but then let’s go to bed.”

  This sexual metaphor brings me to the first problem. In these poems the obscene (in word and concept) is not used, as is common, for the sake of intensity, but rather as a kind of rhythm as the tip-tap of the branches throughout the dream of Finnegans Wake or, to make the analogy even more mysterious to you, a cheering section at a particularly exciting football game. It is precisely because the obscenity is unnecessary that I use it, as I could have used any disturbance, as I could have used anything (remember the beat in jazz) which is regular and beside the point.

  The point. But what, you will be too polite to ask me, is the point? Are not these poems all things to all men, like Rorschach ink blots or whores? Are they anything better than a kind of mirror?

  In themselves, no. Each one of them is a mirror, dedicated to the person that I particularly want to look into it. But mirrors can be arranged. The frightening hall of mirrors in a fun house is universal beyond each particular reflection.

  This letter is to you because you are my publisher and because the poem I wrote for you gives the most distorted reflection in the whole promenade. Mirror makers know the secret—one does not make a mirror to resemble a person, one brings a person to the mirror.

  Love,

  Jack

  For Nemmie

  When they number their blocks they mean business.

  If you hear the Go sign

  Around 32nd Avenue

  Bear it

  Others have

  Better

  On the same street.

  If you hadn’t seen it

  On 16th

  Or 23rd street

  Shit.

  This thing is all traffic.

  And you say

  As you are going through a signal

  Look

  Those motorcycle policemen

  That police love

  Those avenues—

  And the strangers

  (Road agents)

  No one can stop their whispering.

  For Ebbe

  Oh there are waves where the heart beats fully

  Where the blood wanders

  Alive like some black sea fish

  Teach the young to be young

  The old

  To be old

  The heartless

  To swim in the sea they do not believe in.

  Oh, no

  Reconstituted universe

  Is as warm as the heart’s blood.

  For Russ

  Christ,

  You’d think it would all be

  Pretty simple

  This tree will never grow. This bush

  Has no branches. No

  I love you. Yet.

  I wonder how our mouths will look in twenty five years

  When we say yet.

  For Ed

  Bewildered

  Like the first seagull that ever ate a fish

  Everyone’s heart dives and

  Stops just before eating.

  Ah


  What comfort is there in the sight

  Or in the belly?

  No fish in this pond or ocean is supreme

  No fish tastes.

  In all this muck and water there is only

  The ocean’s comfort.

  For Harvey

  When you break a line nothing

  Becomes better.

  There is no new (unless you are humming

  Old Uncle Tom’s Cabin) there is no new

  Measure.

  You breathe the same and Rimbaud

  Would never even look at you.

  Break

  Your poem

  Like you would cut a grapefruit

  Make

  It go to sleep for you

  And each line (There is no Pacific Ocean) And make each line

  Cut itself. Like seaweed thrown

  Against the pier.

  For Mac

  A dead starfish on a beach

  He has five branches

  Representing the five senses

  Representing the jokes we did not tell each other

  Call the earth flat

  Call other people human

  But let this creature lie

  Flat upon our senses

  Like a love

  Prefigured in the sea

  That died.

  And went to water

  All the oceans

  Of emotion. All the oceans of emotion

  Are full of such fish

  Why

  Is this dead one of such importance?

  Died

  With blue of heart’s blood, the brown

  Of unknowing

  The purple of unimportance

  It lies upon our beach to be crowned.

  Purple

  Starfish are

  And love. And love

  Is like nothing I can imagine.

  For Dick

  Innocence is a drug to be protected against strangers

  Not to be sold to police agents or rather

  Not to be sold.

  When you protect it a sudden chill

  Comes in the window

  When you proclaim it it becomes a wet marijuana cigarette

  Which cannot be lit by matches.

  Hear the wind outside

  The bloody shell of your life.

  Hear the wind rumble

  Like a sabre-toothed ape.

  Look

  Innocence is important

  It has meaning

  Look

  It can give us

  Hope against the very winds that we batter against it.

  For Billy

  That old equalizer

  Called time by some

  Love by others

  Cock by a few

  Will come to meet you at the door

  When you go

  (Knowing that death is as near to you as water)

  Go to fuck and say goodbye to your Mexican whore.

  They will be waiting in the same room for you:

  Time with his big jeans

  Love with his embarrassed laugh

  Cock with his throat cut wearing a bandana.

  They can equalize anybody

  January, February, March,

  April, May, June, July, August, September,

  October,

  November,

  December,

  I love you, I love you,

  Scream when you come.

  There is not another room to go into

  But hell, Billy,

  It was hell when they shot you.

  Dear Robin,

  Enclosed you find the first of the publications of White Rabbit Press. The second will be much handsomer.

  You are right that I don’t now need your criticisms of individual poems. But I still want them. It’s probably from old habit—but it’s an awfully old habit. Halfway through After Lorca I discovered that I was writing a book instead of a series of poems and individual criticism by anyone suddenly became less important. This is true of my Admonitions which I will send you when complete. (I have eight of them already and there will probably be fourteen including, of course, this letter.)

  The trick naturally is what Duncan learned years ago and tried to teach us—not to search for the perfect poem but to let your way of writing of the moment go along its own paths, explore and retreat but never be fully realized (confined) within the boundaries of one poem. This is where we were wrong and he was right, but he complicated things for us by saying that there is no such thing as good or bad poetry. There is—but not in relation to the single poem. There is really no single poem.

  That is why all my stuff from the past (except the Elegies and Troilus) looks foul to me. The poems belong nowhere. They are one night stands filled (the best of them) with their own emotions, but pointing nowhere, as meaningless as sex in a Turkish bath. It was not my anger or my frustration that got in the way of my poetry but the fact that I viewed each anger and each frustration as unique—something to be converted into poetry as one would exchange foreign money. I learned this from the English Department (and from the English Department of the spirit—that great quagmire that lurks at the bottom of all of us) and it ruined ten years of my poetry. Look at those other poems. Admire them if you like. They are beautiful but dumb.

  Poems should echo and re-echo against each other. They should create resonances. They cannot live alone any more than we can.

  So don’t send the box of old poetry to Don Allen. Burn it or rather open it with Don and cry over the possible books that were buried in it—the Songs Against Apollo, the Gallery of Gorgeous Gods, the Drinking Songs—all incomplete, all abortive—all incomplete, all abortive because I thought, like all abortionists, that what is not perfect had no real right to live.

  Things fit together. We knew that—it is the principle of magic. Two inconsequential things can combine together to become a consequence. This is true of poems too. A poem is never to be judged by itself alone. A poem is never by itself alone.

  This is the most important letter that you have ever received.

  Love,

  Jack

  For Joe

  People who don’t like the smell of faggot vomit

  Will never understand why men don’t like women

  Won’t see why those never to be forgotten thighs

  Of Helen (say) will move us into screams of laughter.

  Parody (what we don’t want) is the whole thing.

  Don’t deliver us any mail today, mailman.

  Send us no letters. The female genital organ is hideous. We

  Do not want to be moved.

  Forgive us. Give us

  A single example of the fact that nature is imperfect.

  Men ought to love men

  (And do)

  As the man said

  It’s

  Rosemary for remembrance.

  For Judson

  El guardarropa, novedad, dispersar.

  There are little fish that are made angry

  At all that we do. No one can look at us better

  Than their mouth. Little mouths

  That eat anything.

  Ale, automatization, scattering.

  I could not invent a better skeleton

  That you could

  Like a pumpkin on wet Halloween

  Flicker into.

  For Robert

  The poet

  Robert D.

  Writes poetry while we

  Listen to him.

  Commentary—follow

  The red dog

  Down the

  Limit

  Of possible

  Quarterbacks.

  For Jack

  Tell everyone to have guts

  Do it yourself

  Have guts until the guts

  Come through the margins

  Clear and pure

  Like love is.

  The word changes

  Grows obscure

  Like someone

&nbs
p; In the coldness of the scarey night air

  Says—

  Dad

  I want your voice.

  For Willie

  There is no excuse for bad ghosts

  Or bad thoughts.

  6X / 10 equals 150

  And electric socket with a plug in it

  Or a hole in your eyeball:

  It is bad

  And everyone says, “What?” X

  —4X / 10 equals 150.

  For Hal

  Youth

  Is no excuse for such things

  Responsibilities

  Weigh like strawberries

  On a shortcake.

  Go

  To the root of the matter

  Get laid

  Have a friend

  Do anything

  But be a free fucking agent.

  No one

  Has lots of them

  Lays or friends or anything

  That can make a little light in all that darkness.

  There is a cigarette you can hold for a minute

  In your weak mouth

  And then the light goes out,

  Rival, honey, friend,

  And then you stub it out.

  For Jerry

  In the poisonous candy factory

  Or on the beach which is entirely empty of stone

  Or at the bottom of your own navel

  A voice stirs

  Saying, “Sleep

  Though you are no longer young.

  Cry

  On nobody else’s shoulder.

  Love them.

  Go to sleep. Every color

  Our bodies are made of.”

  A Postscript for Charles Olson

  If nothing happens it is possible

  To make things happen.

  Human history shows this

  And an ape

  Is likely (presently) to be an angel.

  If you dream anything

  You are marked

  With a blue tattoo on your arm.

  Rx: Methadrine

  To be taken at 52 miles an hour.

  A BOOK OF MUSIC (1958)

  With words by Jack Spicer