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

A NIGHT IN FOUR PARTS (Second Version)

And gathers in great swarms As darkness comes. They wait Until the darkness make Them dream-birds black As needles and as ultimate. As you branch blanketed in royalty Each lacking claw, bird-real, Will find its rest Throughout your naked branches, Make you feel Birds in the bed Locking their claws against Your privacy.” A NIGHT IN FOUR PARTS (Second Version) Part I: Going to Sleep While the heart twists On a cold bed Without sleep, Under the hot light Of an angry moon A cat leaps. The cat prowls Into cold places, But the heart stays Where the blood is. Spicer: My Vocabulary Did This to Me page 16 16 Part II: Light Sleeping Down in the world Where the cat prowls, Heart’s manikin, His climbing doll Prepares for love: Spawns eye, spawns mouth, Spawns throat, spawns genitals. Heart is so monstrous naked that the world recoils, Shakes like a ladder, Spits like a cat, Disappears. Part III: Wet Dream Downward it plunges through the walls of flesh, Heart falls Through lake and cavern under sleep Deep like an Orpheus A beating mandolin Plucking the plectrum of the moon upon its strings, It sings, it sings, it sings. It sings, “Restore, restore, Eurydice to life. Oh, take the husband and return the wife.” It sings still deeper, conjures by its spell Eurydice, the alley cat of Hell. “Meow, meow, Eurydice’s not dead. Oh, find a cross-eyed tomcat for my bed.” Too late, it was too late he fell. The sounds of singing and the sounds of Hell Become a swarm of angry orange flies And naked Orpheus, moon-shriveled, dies And rises leaving lost Eurydice. His heart falling upward towards humanity Howling and half-awake. Spicer: My Vocabulary Did This to Me page 17 17 Part IV: Waking Heart wakes Twists like a cat on hot bricks Beating off sunlight. Now the heart slinks back to the blood And the day starts. Then the blood asks, “Who was that lover That thrashed you around last night?” And the heart can’t answer. ORPHEUS IN HELL When he first brought his music into hell He was absurdly confident. Even over the noise of the shapeless fires And the jukebox groaning of the damned Some of them would hear him. In the upper world He had forced the stones to listen. It wasn’t quite the same. And the people he remembered Weren’t quite the same either. He began looking at faces Wondering if all of hell were without music. He tried an old song but pain Was screaming on the jukebox and the bright fire Was pelting away the faces and he heard a voice saying, “Orpheus!” He was at the entrance again And a little three-headed dog was barking at him. Later he would remember all those dead voices And call them Eurydice. Spicer: My Vocabulary Did This to Me page 18 18 ...