My Vocabulary Did This to Me Read online

  It’s rather like a medium (a real medium) who gets a spirit, call her Little Eva, to control her. Pretty soon, after a few sessions, she’ll get to know what Little Eva is going to say and start saying it for her. Then it’s no longer a seance but fakery and time to change spooks.

  That’s what your watch tells me. TIME TO CHANGE SPOOKS!

  I don’t know what your table tells you, but if you came back to California we might arrange a favorable exchange of spooks.

  Love,

  Jack

  8.

  Dear James,

  This letter is entirely from the other Jack, the nervous worried guy who puts letters into envelopes and receives them from same. The other Jack, the one who wrote you all the letters, is puzzled about the change of postoffices. This Jack, me, being more practical, is wondering

  (A) Did you receive his last letter (about watch, p.o. vs pawnshop, ghost-trading etc.) before letters of 31st, 1st ult? Or at all?

  (B) Is someone reading and destroying his letters because if so don’t because it is harmless to the real world insofar as poetry is harmless to the real world. Which is not so far.

  Or (C) What?

  He, the other Jack, is probably asleep. I hate him sometimes.

  He (it was really my suggestion) on account of (B) is sending this letter from the address of an imaginary little magazine. We have both still our own.

  Love (insofar as I can say it too)

  Jack

  9.

  The mirror does not break easily regardless of what is reflected in it, regardless of whether there are blue apples, Rimbaud, or even angry white light belonging in it, imprisoned, one might say, in the death of its surface. It is the oblique patience of an Alice who plays with her cat and waits for something between her and the image to melt away. It is the oblique patience of children.

  When you rush bravely against the mirror shouting “This is also my universe” you are likely merely to get a bloody nose. That surface has no patience with violence. Even as these letters are our mirrors and we imprisoned singly in the depths of them.

  So it is (the violence of the impatient artist) that I keep trying to draw the form of these letters to a close merely because I am going to read them to an audience of boobies and one or two poets. Ridiculous attempt to break the glass! The letters will continue. The letters will continue after both of us are dead. The letters would continue even if we were in the same room together, even though our faces were so close that we could hardly speak—or so distant that our hearts could not touch.

  Mirror breaker! I simply do not have the patience merely to let the mirror dissolve. I keep tapping my hand on it. Help me!

  Love,

  Jack

  10.

  Dear James,

  I’ll not explain the mistakes the other Jack made in the last letter. They’re obvious. And I’m sure they belong to the poetry of it somewhere too.

  I am glad that you’re not going to New York. Letters sent to there or received from there would be filled with worms. Any other city. But, of course, if you come here there will be a double advantage for if Jim and the other Jack can’t talk to each other and won’t let James and Jack talk to each other (unlikely because of the bridge of love we have erected between us but possible God knows) we can still, defying both of them, send letters to each other from the same city. Which would be as unnatural as poetry often is.

  Our letters again will cross. Your watch will count out the days and hours of the month. As our letters will.

  Love,

  Jack

  11.

  Dear Jim,

  I am writing this letter to you rather than James as it is a Christmas letter and both he and I would find it uncomfortable—like saying Merry Christmas to Rimbaud. You, on the other hand, having several faces will be able to select a face appropriate to its reception.

  Religion is the shadow of the obvious—and all the paraphernalia of Christmas from the Christ child to the Santa Claus selling ties in a department-store window is just this—religion—the infinite shadow that a false beard or a plaster child can cast. What is under that book lying face downward on the bed or that green radio on the floor? Whatever it is disappears when you pick the object up, but on holidays you can see the shadow that the thing casts. That is why a real Child is born on Christmas, why there is a Santa Claus.

  Why am I writing you to tell you about this? It is because I am afraid that you may be too young to believe and James too busy to believe in this holiday, that you may confuse the shadows with the things that cast them and believe that there is nothing there. This is not important to James, to the poet who can watch in his own poetry something even more than these shadows—but it is you I am wishing Merry Christmas.

  Tell James: I am reading my poetry in public on February 14th and at it reading all his letters.

  Jack

  12.

  Dear James

  It was not really the thought of reading them (because I didn’t, not on Valentine’s Day which would be a threat of perfection, but tomorrow to poets at one of those poetry meetings that were in your time Sundays) but as the prose stretches like a big rubber ball with no middle to it, but the hoverings and threats of evil (do you understand magic or do I have to teach it to you?) that made me lean on the death of our letters. It is a black thing evil is, having nothing to do with good and bad, or even beautiful and fucked up, having much more to do with the inside and outside of a man than good does.

  The opposite of it is poetry or pajamas or Paracelsus or anything else in the universe that begins with P.

  Magic begins with M and is neutral. So does man, more, much, me, made, middle, meetings, and the last half of tomorrow. Evil denies that this could even be an alphabet.

  This is so near to the truth that I don’t want to finish the letter. Love that begins with an L like my heart does.

  Love,

  Jack

  13.

  Dear James,

  “Sun Dance” have just arrived. They speak in wholly (think how they would divide that word) wholly different language. I should have known in the places in the letters but that was more like seeing the impossible footprints of a bird on the wet sand—and now seeing the bird I don’t know why but I keep thinking of a pterodactyl.

  How can they be read by voice? But why in hell should we have to use our mouths to hear messages? And the letters of the alphabet (as Thoth and Rimbaud both told me) are more than mere sounds. But I want to hear the words from your mouth—that’s what one unsurprised part of me demands—like when they didn’t have any way to write them down and they had to be chanted around a fire in a cave or a banquet hall. And the words and the sounds of the words were the same thing. But at that rate the painter would still be chiseling pictures of animals on blank rock.

  Tired ar/gue/ments. “Sun Dance” are a school of real birds having come from somewhere up there. I take off my head to you.

  Love,

  Jack

  14.

  In the Grand Pyramid they buried the king with all his bottles, postage stamps, and half-eaten loaves of bread. Were they really the king’s, Cocteau asks us in his article on Memory, or were they manufactured for the occasion?

  No one knows better than I do how lonely you are.

  In the Grand Pyramid there are the most complicated mathematical systems and the most complicated moral systems and chains of amethyst and diamond hanging just out of reach. It is the center of the universe.

  Were they invented for the occasions?

  In the Grand Pyramid it is darker than it ever was and the king is still there. The king communicates by magic and he tells me “Build a pyramid for yourself” and he tells you, “Find a postage stamp” and he eats a little of the bread and drinks a little from the bottles he has manufactured.

  The postage stamp has a picture of the Grand Pyramid engraved on it; the pyramid has not been yet invented.

  No one knows how lonely you are better than I
do.

  APOLLO SENDS SEVEN NURSERY RHYMES

  TO JAMES ALEXANDER (1959)

  I.

  You have not listened to a word I have sung

  Said Orpheus to the trees that did not move

  Your branches vibrate at the tones of my lyre

  Not at the sounds of my lyre.

  You have set us a tough problem said the trees

  Our branches are rooted in fact to the ground

  Through our trunks said the trees

  But calm as an ax Orpheus came

  To the trees and sang on his lyre a song

  That the trees have no branches the trunks have no tree

  And the roots that are gathered along

  Are bad for the branches the trunk and the tree

  Say, said the trees, that’s a song

  And they followed him wildly through rivers and ocean

  Till they ended in Thrace with a bang.

  II.

  At the La Brea Tar Pits

  There is a sheer drop then twenty feet of stars. I

  Believe this occasionally.

  The white skeletons

  Jammed in there in the black tar

  Don’t come back

  Can’t

  Come back

  No ghosts

  Only occasionally

  Ronnie.

  III.

  The mouse ran up the chessboard

  The mouse ran down the chessboard

  He destroyed:

  two pawns and a queen and bit a hell of an edge

  off a black rook

  Savage

  As the god of plague is savage

  Apollo the mouse ran up the chessboard

  Down the chessboard.

  IV.

  Or, explaining the poem to myself, Jay Herndon has only three words in his language

  Door: which means that he is to throw something which will make a sound like a door banging.

  Fffish: which means that there is something that somebody showed him

  And Car: which is an object seen at a great distance

  He will learn words as we did

  I tell you, Jay, clams baked in honey

  Would never taste as strange.

  I died again and was reborn last night

  That is the way with we mirror people

  Forgive me, I am a child of the mirror and not a child of

  the door.

  Yes Apollo, I dare. And if the door opens

  North of the North Wind

  V.

  A Christmas toy misdirected, a baseball game, A-

  Stounding Science Fiction

  All this, but the eyes are full

  Of tears? of visions? of trees?

  So close to nonsense that the mind shuttles

  So full of nonsense.

  That there could be a hand, a throat, a thigh

  So close to nonsense that the mind shuttles

  Between

  The subway, station of what would’

  Nt.

  VI. The Death of Arthur

  Pushing wood, they call it when you make automatic moves in a chess game or in a poem

  Pushing tar

  The sound, the subway, the skeleton of the whole circumstances you and everybody else was born with

  The dance (that you do whenever Apollo or any other smaller god is not watching you) the dance

  Of probability

  Be-

  ing human.

  VII.

  Fire works

  But like the bottom of an alley

  They works only

  With people in them.

  Justly suspicious

  Jay did not like the sparks flying past his head

  Although they were blue green yellow and purple

  And several also made a big whhupp.

  Fire works

  Broken words

  But never repairing

  Jay, justly suspicious,

  Afterwards

  Said, “Fffish.”

  A BIRTHDAY POEM FOR JIM (AND JAMES) ALEXANDER (1959)

  It is a story for chil

  dren

  Poetry

  A search for good

  Or against evil

  Or merely a story.

  Those Babylonian faces

  Stone to the touch.

  Like ours

  Heros have heavy lips

  Their legs are lead

  Their arms

  Cannot quite encircle

  Or come to grips

  With

  (They are the mirror-birds

  Don’t trust ’em.)

  Lack ours

  Those heavy lips

  The words read back at you. Broken for you

  The playing

  Of some children

  And good

  And evil standing

  There.

  ______________

  Jim-almost-James tells me he likes Tolkien

  “He doesn’t water down good and evil,” they say. “He sees them.”

  Everything that is in the pawnshop is for sale. Truth

  Is a drinking fountain.

  I can’t describe good

  But once tried to in a poem about a starfish

  Or your watery eyes

  Seeing nothing but what they told you. Mordor

  Is so black that eye can’t fathom

  The fact of it.

  The carefulness of believing in my words, your watery eyes, my

  Truth.

  _______________

  The 49ers battling to keep place with the Baltimore Colts. No quarterback

  Will find the right receiver. The whole game

  Is absolute darkness.

  Or tell the young to fight. Olson. Big Daddy

  Linebacker for the port of the big wish.

  Words are not enough. No quarterback

  Will find words enough. No linebacker

  Can tackle words. They only exist in a poem. Or there maybe

  On the forty yardline in darkness.

  It is Dover Beach played on a dead piano. A picnic into dream. A silence. That linebacker

  His silhouette on the playing field alone.

  ______________

  Deep-

  er than meaning

  He lies there amazed at what has happened

  Like a dream-

  er

  Deep in the sea.

  Those pen-

  guins were his eyes. Those rocks

  His sole substance.

  _______________

  Caro m’è il sonno, e più l’esser di sasso,

  mentre che il danno, e la vergogna dura;

  non veder, non sentir, m’è gran ventura;

  perό non mi destar; deh, parla basso

  _______________

  Sucking all the personal from his birthday one obtains

  The familiar objects.

  One half of a lemon, a voice from a park bench of a park that is not there, the thrill of looking at something newly with someone or rather an X-ray of that emotion. The familiar objects are almost a bedroom.

  I mean what obtains is. What catches

  In the seams of one’s pantlegs or pants. Wild oats, thistles, vacant emotions. Like the dust that is really all of the earth’s surface

  Sucking all the personal from his birthday one obtains

  A birthday, an imaginary rose.

  ______________

  Poetry seeks occasion. In a man’s life

  There is May, June, December, birthdays, nothing else really matters.

  (I don’t understand why I omitted October. Poetry seeks occasions. In a man’s life

  There are birthdays.)

  The style of a poem is the armor we wear and May, June, December are the months of a year. I don’t understand why I omitted October. I love you.

  And if this isn’t a birthday present, nothing is.

  _______________

  Days without rain. The waste land

>   They call it that in their English Department

  Or him, her, them—like rain beating on a deaf tin roof.

  Or why I can’t call him anymore

  Or answer him his

  Letters

  _______________

  This poem ends in anger

  Like a novel.

  There is stuff enough to tell you

  What hours are

  And no more.

  You have hours

  There are

  To use them. Choose your

  Cake.

  ______________

  It is Gresham’s law: bad money

  Drives out good money; bad

  Drives out good; bad money

  Drives out good.

  It is the primal scene. Cain

  And Able to end all that

  The end of the grain, mushrooms, and wildflowers.

  The nearness of when good was there. Fuck

  You.

  _______________

  The Poet Insists on Saying the Last Word

  The buzzards wheeling in the sky are Thanksgiving

  Making their own patterns

  There in the sky where they have left us

  It is hot down here where they have left us

  On the hill or in the city. The hell

  Of personal relations

  It is like a knot in the air. Their wings free

  Is there—our shadows.

  IMAGINARY ELEGIES

  V.

  Another wrong turning

  Another five years. I can’t see

  The birds, the island, anything

  But vacant shifts and twists of the tunnel

  That means

  Another five years I can’t see.

  Or were they all right turnings