from Fifteen False Propositions About God
Jack Spicer
1958
I
The self is no longer real
It is not like loneliness
This big huge loneness. Sacrificing
All of the person with it.
Bigger people
I'm sure have mastered it.
"Beauty is so rare a thing," Pound sings
"So few drink at my fountain."
II
Look I am King Of The Forest
Says The King Of The Forest
As he growls magnificently
Look, I am in pain. My right leg
Does not fit my left leg.
I am King Of The Forest
Says The King Of The Forest.
And the other beasts hear him and would rather
They were King Of The Forest
But that their right leg
Would fit their left leg.
"Beauty is so rare a thing," Pound sang.
"So few drink at my fountain."
III
Beauty is so rare a th---
Sing a new song
Real
Music
A busted flush. A pain in the eyebrows. A
Visiting card.
There are rocks on the mountains that will lie there for fifty
years and I only lived with you three months
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.
