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

THE DANCING APE

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 ...