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

SONNET FOR THE BEGINNING OF WINTER

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 His songs of disbelief will fill our hearts As long as winter lasts, as long as we Are distant partners of this agony Too far apart to keep each other warm. So let our hearts lie dead like fields of snow Unloved, untouched until the distant spring Grows closer and the gentle birds return And fill the empty air, and sing. ON READING LAST YEAR’S LOVE POEMS The heart’s a sprinting thing and hammers fast. The word is slow and rigid in its pace. But, if they part once, they must meet at last As when the rabbit and the tortoise race. Words follow heartbeats, arrogant and slow As if they had forever in their load, As if the race were won, as if they go To meet a dying rabbit on the road. Then, step by step, the words become their own. The turtle creeps ahead to win the prize. But, ah, the sweeter touch, the quicker boon Is lost forever when the rabbit dies. ORPHEUS IN ATHENS The boy had never seen an honest man. He looked among us every night he said. He eyed each stranger like Diogenes And took him with his lantern into bed. Spicer: My Vocabulary Did This to Me page 39 39 ...