My Vocabulary Did This to Me Page 13
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