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.