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

IInd PHASE OF THE MOON

IInd PHASE OF THE MOON Son of Pan with thighs smooth as raw silk, send some of our dreams back to us from your moonless north. Unnatural sorcerer, you spend your days watching the birds conceal themselves in a cloudless sky or hunting the same birds like a patch of fog in the darkness of birch thickets. No living man has seen you. The sun that shines so brightly on your lips has made you forget how to cast a shadow. We have been looking for you on the insides of mirrors. You might have given us great joy. No, you are too tall for love. Along your thighs your love is erected by the birds’ screaming, is empty as a lake. No living man has seen such innocence. Unaware of us as an autumn, you are born and you die in the middle of our parks and our oceans. You hide nothing. You cannot imagine the eyes with which we could watch you. Let me say now that we suspect you. Let me say now that you have already made yourself known to us as a murderer. Let me say now that our love for you is only an insane abstraction of the love that we have been waiting to give. IIIrd PHASE OF THE MOON You stand on a small hill overlooking a valley we were not able to visit. You raise your arms and out of the air comes a mad procession of herons and sparrows flying past you and a small wren, frightened, which flies just above your naked shoulder. We would snatch at the cold wing as it passes, but you blow kisses at its moving shadow. You have broken up all auguries and patterns. Yours is the magnificent nonsense of experience. In China the nights are cold. Vague tigers gather around your fire and watch you breathlessly. I have not seen you flying into the heart of the Spicer: My Vocabulary Did This to Me page 53 53 ...