Jack Spicer is my valentine

So Jack Spicer asked me out. I wasn't sure if I was going to go, but he was sweet, unassuming, didn't expect anything from me. Just a few hours of togetherness.

I'd never read anything by him. I'm still somewhat new to poetry, still feeling my way. Focusing on contemporary work, while slowly filling in the back story with the classics of the 20th century.

C buys a lot of books, which is good for me because I like to read, often directionless, book to book as they appear in front of me. In this house there's no shortage.

I'd heard the name, loved the title (my vocabulary did this to me - supposedly his last words), so I picked it up the other day, daunting in its collectedness at nearly 500 pages. Well-behaved reader that I am, as expected to do so, I read the intro AND the "about this edition." I was into it. The first handful of poems though? Good lord, no. I'm not really into poets waxing all mythological. I mean, I know that's a style and there's a great tradition and I should have paid more attention to Edith Hamilton. That's on me. And I like it the way I like the Bible. For the silly stories. Kind of in the abstract. I don't want either to feature in the poetry I read, though god and gods can be done well.

Then I got to "Imaginary Elegies":

Yes, be like God. I wonder what I thought
When I wrote that. The dreamers sag a bit
As if five years had thickened on their flesh
Or on my eyes. Wake them with what?
Should I throw rocks at them
To make their naked private bodies bleed?
No. Let them sleep. This much I’ve learned
In these five years in what I spent and earned:
Time does not finish a poem.
The dummies in the empty funhouse watch
The tides wash in and out. The thick old moon
Shines through the rotten timbers every night.
This much is clear, they think, the men who made
Us twitch and creak and put the laughter in our throats
Are just as cold as we. The lights are out.
The lights are out.
You’ll smell the oldest smells—
The smell of salt, of urine, and of sleep
Before you wake. This much I’ve learned
In these five years in what I’ve spent and earned:
Time does not finish a poem.
What have I gone to bed with all these years?
What have I taken crying to my bed
For love of me?
Only the shadows of the sun and moon
The dreaming groins, their creaking images.
Only myself.
Is there some rhetoric
To make me think that I have kept a house
While playing dolls? This much I’ve learned
In these five years in what I’ve spent and earned:
That two-eyed monster God is still above.
I saw him once when I was young and once
When I was seized with madness, or was I seized
And mad because I saw him once. He is the sun
And moon made real with eyes.
He is the photograph of everything at once. The love
That makes the blood run cold.
But he is gone. No realer than old
Poetry. This much I’ve learned
In these five years in what I’ve spent and earned:
Time does not finish a poem.
Upon the old amusement pier I watch
The creeping darkness gather in the west.
Above the giant funhouse and the ghosts
I hear the seagulls call. They’re going west
Toward some great Catalina of a dream
Out where the poem ends.
But does it end?
The birds are still in flight. Believe the birds.

*

I'm hooked. We're spending the day together, just me and Jack. Maybe a bottle of gin. Maybe some Chinese take-out.