A JACK SPICER NOTEBOOK
We make up a different language for poetry
And for the heart—ungrammatical.
“Transformations II”
Ungrammatical heart, singalong
Thump of the intertwinable out, what
Makes you make music is the sheer ordinary
And welcome
Textual welter and ingress,
the unstoppable ahoy!
The word the text sings out setting down its small heap
Of baggage.
Only to be getting along out of there shortly.
A tiny French policeman of the heart
barks Circulez!
And the text does so—
Hoisting its own endless journey-
Scuff of a trunk
Stuck all over with the stickers of whatever real
The heart puts its name to—
Gino & Carlo’s,
The John Dee Spa & Cafeteria,
Pomponazzi’s-on-the-Wharf.
———
A little allegory of the heart
And its furtive list is nothing more than a listing
Toward the charming expedient
Of our own proper names,
Our own improper expediting and delivery—as self—
Of a self not to be had.
How did I get that inside inside and the answer is I didn’t:
I went into the heart not knowing
And out of the heart I sang,
out in a slow arc over sun-
Scuffed wilderness,
Out over the there
Where real lemons fire the immediate
Syllables of light
And poetry ain’t never mistook for no money,
No scripture,
No light.
Out of the heart I sang
Not knowing, not listing to know.
———
A different language. True to itself untrue.
Language noises
Stoking the machine of the heart.
The heart
A machine running all about all over, discoursing
The American field.
Two words in unfriendly footrace.
Two words teaming up for a three-legged race.
Words in a burlap sack.
Two hearts in a burlap sack.
Language noises
In a grove of lemons.
———
Spicer, what language says it says with a warning.
It says I am sober enough to know
I am drunk.
We 86 it and it 86’s us.
We lean it home.
We fix it
a gin and tonic with a twist.
That tumbler we set down before it is the poem
We knock over in our rapturous hurry
To get it set down.
Only days later, carrying to the sink that endless cloud-
Smudge of a tumbler, do we read the words.
The words read Spicer,
What language says it says
With a warning.
+++
COLD AND ARCH
A Rebell it mought be,
And lookit that silver Sun,
A Cold cumbrous column, it
Go down like a shoe
Into mud. Regret is a
Seam in the day, bunch’d
Up surly, a mugging Cross
Alignment and gerrymander. A Plight
Wroth-scumbled and sky-scald’d.
Skullduggery and scambling, Rift in
The pitkin, liturgical Spitting in
Unsanctifiable Dirt. Fear not my
Little fleck and haemorrhage, fear
Not my gospell Squall, my
Arch and holler, my sacerdotal
Imperium, my squawk, my Gun.