My Vocabulary Did This to Me Page 15
Why
Does
Your absence seem so real or your presences
So uninviting?
IV.
Real bad poems
Dear Sir: I should like to—
Hate and love are clarifications enough of themselves, do not belong in poetry, embarrass the reader and the poet, lack
Dignity.
Or the dignity of a paper airplane
That you throw at someone’s face
And it swoops across the whole occasion quickly
Hitting every angle.
Hate and love are clar—
Dear Sir: I should like to make sure that everything that I said about you in my poetry was true, that you really existed,
That everything that I said was true
That you were not an occasion
In a real bad scene
That what the poems said had meaning
Apart from what the poems said.
Dear Sir:
My mouth has meanings
It had not wanted to argue.
V.
When the house falls you wonder
If there will ever be poetry
And you shiver in the timbers wondering
If there will ever be poetry
When the house falls you shiver
In the vacant lumber of your poetry.
Beauty is so rare a thing, Pound sang.
So few drink at my fountain.
VI.
Drop
The word drops
As if it were not spoken
I can’t remember tomorrow
What I said tonight
(To describe the real world.
Even in a poem
One forgets the real world.)
Fuzzy heads of fuzzy people
Like the trees Williams saw. Drop
The words drop
Like leaves from a fuzzy tree
I can’t remember tomorrow
I (alone in the real world with their fuzzy heads nodding at me)
Can’t
Remember.
VII.
Trees in their youth look younger
Than almost anything
I mean
In the spring
When they put forth green leaves and try
To look like real trees
Honest to God my heart aches
When I see them trying.
Comes August and the sunshine and the fog and only the wood grows
They stand there with big rough leaves amazed
That it is no longer summer.
The cold fog seeps in and by November
They don’t look the same (the leaves I mean) the leaves fall
Such a hard reason to seek. Such heart’s
Timber.
VIII.
Shredded wheat, paper maché
Nobody believes in you
Least of all us trees.
Who find ourselves at the final edge
Of a cliff or at least an ocean
Eating salt air and fog and rock
Just standing
There
Bother your fuzzy heads about God. Gee
God is not even near your roots or our roots
He is the nearest
Tree.
IX.
After you have told your lover goodbye
And chewed the cud of your experience with him
Your bitter experience:
What else?
Perhaps trees. Slippery elm. Birch
That knows no thankless nights. Oaktrees and palm
Ready to start a revolution.
No you should stay there with your roots in the ground
Ready to drink whatever water
The rain is willing to send you. The rain
The cow
And my true body a
Revolution.
X.
“Trees. Those fuzzy things?” Williams’ grandfather or was it his grandmother asked on the way to the hospital. A journey
We will all take.
I do not remember the poem well but I know that beauty
Will always become fuzzy
And love fuzzy
And the fact of death itself fuzzy
Like a big tree.
Let me chop down then one by one
Whatever is in the way of my eyesight
People, trees, even my own eyestalks.
Let me chop apart
With my bare hands
This blurred forest.
XI.
In the grotto of knowingness
There is born a child. There is born a child
Like we Protestants say in our Christmas carols.
Saint Mary
Virgin mistress
Author of One Word
Give me strength to have joy. The heart wants it
The ball bounces
Faster than any eye can see. I believe you love me
Like a fried egg can exist on a purple plate alone
Or being born.
How love can exist without any favor to it
As George told me you said the
Joyful mysteries.
XII.
Millions of meaningless toys
If the child isn’t born soon we’ll have to close the toyshop. The second
Joyful mystery.
They make them out of trees and rubber bands and place them in stockings and cradles
No one
Knows how to play with them.
Kneel
At his birth
Meaningless
As he is
They are not his toys or our toys we must play with. They are
Our toys.
XIII.
Hush now baby don’t say a word
Mama’s going to buy you a mocking bird
The third
Joyful mystery.
The joy that descends on you when all the trees are cut down and all the fountains polluted and you are still alive waiting for an absent savior. The third
Joyful mystery.
If the mocking bird don’t sing
Mama’s going to buy you a diamond ring
The diamond ring is God, the mocking bird the Holy Ghost. The third
Joyful mystery.
The joy that descends on you when all the trees are cut down and all the fountains polluted and you are still alive waiting for an absent savior.
XIV.
If the diamond ring turns brass
Mama’s going to buy you a looking glass
Marianne Moore and Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams going on a picnic together when they were all students at the University of Pennsylvania
Now they are all over seventy and the absent baby
Is a mirror sheltering their image.
XV.
Dear Sir:
In these poems I tried to find the three-headed God I believed in sometimes both when talking with you and living with you. The abysmal toyshop
Intrudes.
(It is hell where no one
Guesses another. It is after
Every thing.)
No thought coheres or sensation. It is five o’clock in the morning.
If the mocking bird don’t sing
Mama’s going to buy you a diamond ring
This is the last joyful mystery
The end of all guessing.
LETTERS TO JAMES ALEXANDER (1958-1959)
1.
Fort Wayne, Indiana, is the capital of Nitrogen. All streets end there. No buses arrive there except those that carry direct mail or cargoes of Negroes en route on the Underground Railway. There has never been a city made up of so many arms.
You can see Troy, New York in the distance.
Christmas poems and lovers’ holly branches grow there in the winter as well as stuffings of turkeys, memory pie, and little droppings of passing angels. It is not reached by air.
Fort Wayne, Indiana, has industries and tou
rnament golf, and blocks and blocks of weeping buildings. It is built on high ground above the slough of utter unwinding.
The birds which all look like seagulls or cormorants in its artificial sky finish singing when the day is over. At night they look like elephants. People watch them with telescopes as they hover.
In Fort Wayne, Indiana the trees are dying and you can see footprints in the rather wet snow. People take their motor scooters to bed with them.
Come back to California, come back to California every mapmaker, every mapmaker is pleading to James Alexander.
“What do the sparrows eat in the winter?” I asked someone once in Minneapolis. He replied, “They eat horse turds if they can find them.”
There are acres of cold snow.
Love,
Jack
2.
Railroad trains lost their balance and buses stood on their hind ends and licked their wounded wheels when James Alexander came back to California.
And poor airplanes dripped sweat from their wings and little cars mooed as if they were not quite convinced they were mechanical.
When James Alexander came back to California he and the other poet who exists in the universe formulated a series of true propositions:
THAT POETRY ALONE CAN LOVE POETRY
THAT POEMS CRY OUT TO EACH OTHER FROM A GREAT DISTANCE
THAT POETS, BEING BASTARD FATHERS, LOVE EACH OTHER LIKE BASTARD FATHERS WHEN THEY SEE THEIR CHILDREN PLAYING TOGETHER
THAT POEMS PLAY TOGETHER FROM A GREAT DISTANCE
It was made illegal for a bachelor to watch poems.
When James Alexander came back to California they hunted mushrooms together in the cold rocks of the Berkeley Hills.
They invented a game which was more complicated than bridge or chess or football which was played with gum and chalk and a piece of common wrapping paper.
They made it utterly impossible to identify God.
Having a hand in each other’s hand, they walked down every street on which it was possible to walk, having the pavements dictated to them by an angel.
They purged history of contemporary reference.
They wrote poetry that had to be looked at from a distance on a gigantic playground. Their children split words.
The scholars who found these children died in agony.
One thumb opposed one thumb, each thumb was the center of the universe.
They forged a lost manuscript of Rimbaud’s La Chasse Spirituelle for their own purposes. It was mysteriously discovered to have been written in English.
They found that they had one tongue
We shall find that we have one tongue
I hope that we shall find that we have one tongue.
Love,
Jack
3.
Dear James,
I don’t know if there is room in the world for a postoffice but you come across ’em often enough, if you don’t make the mistake of pretending that they’re in a fixed place (like the moon) and if you don’t let their continual changes bewilder you.
It’s rather like hunting mushrooms. They grow in certain places and you can never be sure where their (certain) places will be after the next rain but you get a sense of where they won’t be and don’t go there. Unless, of course, they tell you.
The letters, poems, kisses (since the original game of postoffice is stuck in the mysterious regions of childhood) are directed by a fantastically inefficient system up to the place where poetry comes from and then back down again to the person whose poetry, or letters, or love was meant to receive it. It is a lot different from Air Mail.
And it is almost impossible to list the random places from which they will deliver their letters. A box of shredded wheat, a drunken comment, a big piece of paper, a shadow meaningless except as a threat or a communication, a throat.
Believe them all but obey the postofficers who tell you when to believe them or obey them.
If you don’t have money for the money order why not send me the pawntickets (I have money for a few months) and I will send you pawntickets with the equivalents of a watch and a typewriter upon them. The real pawntickets are letters.
Love,
Jack
4.
Dear James,
Went down to Duncan and Jess’s Friday to read them the letters.
Their house is built mainly of Oz books, a grate to burn wood, a second story for guests, paintings, poems, and miscellaneous objects of kindly magic. Cats. It is a place where I am proud (we are proud) to read the letters. It is a postoffice. I had not realized how little alone one is in a postoffice. Before I had merely posted the letters and wondered.
It is possible if you have the humility to create a household and the sense to tread on all pieces of bad magic as soon as they appear to create a postoffice. It is as mechanical as Christmas.
Late at night (we drank a gallon of wine and talked about the worlds that had to be included into our poetry—Duncan wanted me to send Creeley the letters because Creeley, he said, needed the letters—and I went to bed upstairs with George MacDonald’s Lilith). I had to piss and walked down the outside stairs and saw (or heard but I think I saw) the ocean and the moonless stars that filled the sky so full of light I understood size for the first time. They seemed, while I was pissing away the last of the wine and the conversation, a part of the postoffice too.
This I promise—that if you come back to California I will show you where they send letters—all of them, the poems and the ocean. The invisible
Love,
Jack
5.
It is not the monotony of nature but the poems beyond nature that call to each other above the poets’ heads. The heads of poets being a part of nature. It is not for us to make the lines of nature precise. It is for the poems to make the lines of nature precise. Because of their fatal attraction for the lines of nature, for our heads.
We proclaim a silent revolution. The poems above our heads, without tongues, are tired of talking to each other over the gabble of our beliefs, our literary personalities, our attempts to project their silent conversation to an audience. When we give tongue we amplify. We are telephone switchboards deluded into becoming hi-fi sets. The terrible speakers must be allowed silence. They are not speaking to us.
How is it then our business to talk of revolution—we heads of poets one named Jack and one named James, three in the distance named Ebbe, Charles, and Robert? It is because we as their victims, as their mouthpiece, must learn to become complete victims, complete pieces of their mouth. We must learn that our lips are not our own. A revolution is a savage education.
There are people that talk about poetry like tired insurance clerks talk about baseball. They must be destroyed by our silence. Even the hatred of them interrupts the conversation that our poems wish to continue. Even the mention of them makes it me talking, crashes into paradox that was their truth.
We do not write for each other. We are irritable radio sets (but the image of the talking head of a horse on the wall in Cocteau’s first Orpheus was a truer image) but our poems write for each other, being full of their own purposes, no doubt no more mysterious in their universe than ours in ours. And our lips are not our lips. But are the lips of heads of poets. And should shout revolution.
Love,
Jack
6.
Dear James
It is absolutely clear and absolutely sunny as if neither a cloud nor a moon had ever been invented. I am lying here on the grass of the University of California, a slave state but one which today seems peculiarly beneficent. I have not had a letter from you in weeks.
I read them all (your letters and mine) to the poets assembled for the occasion last Wednesday. Ebbe was annoyed since he thought that letters should remain letters (unless they were essays) and poems poems (a black butterfly just flew past my leg) and that the universe of the personal and the impersonal should be kept in order. George Stanley thought that I was robbing Jim to pay James. They soun
ded beautiful all of them.
Things cannot die in such a spring (unless the old men of the world commit suicide (our suicide) over the question of whether East Germans be called East Germans in diplomatic notes) and every leaf and flower of this red-hot February asks me to remember this. Though it is on the other side of poetry, spring, thank whatever created both of them, is spring. And I am not sure on a day like this that the living and dying world does not have something analogous to poetry in it. That every flower and every leaf (properly read) is not a James as well as a Jim.
Things cannot die in such a spring and yet your silence (for the spring itself proclaims that there are such things as clouds and moons) frightens me when I close my eyes or begin to write a poem.
I wish you were with me now on this grass and could be with me like the leaves and the flowers and the grass a part of this spring. Jim and James.
Love,
Jack
7.
Dear James,
The only place I’ve found to retire into is your watch. I haven’t covered it with bark and it is in no sense beautiful, but I haven’t worn a watch in two years and I talk to it (mostly about you and what it was like to be worn on your wrist) and sometimes I spend a few seconds watching its second hand stuttering by (green and nervous) and it really is, all things considered, a natural object like a tree or a flower or a bark covered table. A postoffice.
And the watch believes what I tell it. “There are two kinds of places in the world,” it wants me to tell you, “pawnshops and postoffices.” You will find it hard to reeducate.
I don’t like my poetry either. I read a new poem last Wednesday and nobody said much of anything and I asked why and Duncan said it was because it was a very good Jack Spicer poem and I threw the poem in the garbage sack not tearing the poem because it was a very good Jack Spicer poem. The watch was ticking on my wrist all the time and was not a Jack Spicer wristwatch and would never be a Jack Spicer wristwatch and that should be the way with the poems.