My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer

THE SCROLLWORK ON THE CASKET

THE SCROLLWORK ON THE CASKET To walk down the streets with a dead man or to hold conversation with him over coffee in a public restaurant would be hopelessly eccentric. To entertain a corpse in private, to worry him in the privacy of one’s room or in the cramped and more frightening privacy of a short story is an eccentricity more easily forgivable. A short story is narrower than a room in a cheap hotel; it is narrower than the wombs through which we descended. It does violence to any large dead man to force him within it. To fit him (even his body) into the casket of a few paragraphs, he must be twisted and contorted; his stiff arms, his extended legs must be hacked or broken. A rigor mortis operates within the memory; his image stiffens and resists in every inch. One must maim him to fit him in. Then, when success is achieved and the sweating author has managed to get shut his casket of paragraphs, hammering on it in a perfect fury to keep the body from bursting out, what then? He has a casket, a small regular box with a corpse inside it, and he can sell it on the market where such boxes are sold—and it has been safer, it has been less eccentric and altogether more profitable than walking down the streets with a dead man ever could have been. There are some complaints from the customers, however. These caskets all look alike. They are brown or gray or purple (almost never black), the customers complain that they don’t look very much like people. The customers are right. The outside of the casket is made up mostly of the writer, his descriptions, his feelings, his fancies, his regrets—little or nothing about the corpse on the inside. Nothing but a few spoken words. But it is those words, only them, which give the third dimension to the story, show that there is space inside the casket. For this reason whenever I read a short story I skip through the narrative paragraphs and concentrate on the dialogue. (That is the scrollwork on the casket.) “Whenever I read a short story,” Ken said, looking up from his coffee, “I skip through the narrative paragraphs and concentrate on the Spicer: My Vocabulary Did This to Me page 24 24 dialogue.” He paused for a moment. “And that’s the scrollwork on the casket,” he added parenthetically. It is Ken, of course, who is dead. It is his casket I hammer now. Obviously there is something hallucinatory in the hammering of caskets. Whenever I hammer a nail into the outside of the casket, I can hear someone, on the inside, also hammering a nail. That’s the trouble with this burial business; it’s hard to know who’s on the inside and who’s on the outside, whether the living bury the dead or the dead bury the living. “The dead bury the living,” Ken said. He pulled his coat tightly around his shoulders and walked a few yards ahead of me. “The dead never return to the living; it is the living that return to the dead. People search out the ghosts they find.” He walked silently ahead of me for a while and then stopped. He leaned against a heavy box and looked at me with something like pity. “I think I’m going to be sick,” he said. I think I’m going to be sick. THE DANCING APE The dancing ape is whirling round the beds Of all the coupled animals; they, sleeping there In warmth of sex, ignore his fur and fuss And feel no terror in his gait of loneliness. Quaint though the dancer is, his furry fists Are locked like lightning over all their heads. His legs are thrashing out in discontent As if they were the lightning’s strict embodiment. But let the dancing stop, the apish face go shut in sleep, The hands unclench, the trembling legs go loose— And let some curious animal bend and touch that face With nuzzling mouth, would not the storm break— And that ape kiss? Spicer: My Vocabulary Did This to Me page 25 25 ...