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

PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST

One wins and they embrace there while the wind Grows louder and the screen begins to fade. Then all the men and boxers bind their wounds Behind an empty screen, and are afraid. PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST Ovid among the Thracians soon received A willing smile from those who baked his bread; Walked country highways thinking of the dead; Was nodded at by strangers as he grieved. Not at Colonus, speaking sacred words But cunning, exile, silence—country things. As winter came he watched familiar birds Fly southwards toward the sea on little wings. SONNET FOR THE BEGINNING OF WINTER A kind of numbness fills your heart and mine, A gap where things and people once had been. We fell unloved, like frozen fields of snow Upon which not a track has broken through. The robin and the thrush have taken wing. The sparrow stays. He sings a dismal song And eats the seed uncovered in the snow. An ugly bird, call him the heart’s agony. Spicer: My Vocabulary Did This to Me page 38 38 ...