Hello everyone,
I’m back with a different set of poems this time. A few of these poems were published a while ago, but the magazine that published them no longer exists, so I thought I’d send them back out into the world, this time with all their counterparts. I wrote these poems before I transitioned and they deal with everything from greek philosophy & mythology to masculinity & gay male love. They’re addressed to the poet Jack Spicer, using the title of one of his series of poems. They’re the oldest group of poems in my current manuscript, so some of them are not as polished as some other things I’ve posted here, but I keep them as they are a part of me & my history.
Imaginary Elegies for Jack Spicer “it's as if you go into a room, a dark room, the light is turned on for a minute, then it's turned off again, and then you go into a different room where a light is turned on and off” Jack Spicer, Vancouver Lectures pre-transition poems I. Put me in a high place when it comes, so I can see the talons pressing in to the abdomen as it recedes to find the liver in that fraught body that never existed in punishment for heat & light that did. I’m looking now for heat & light. Have you got any left to spare? or is it really true the dead are cold? Jammed into boxes that do exist & into ground that roughly always has. Prometheus is dead, sure, but what did that ever do for us? I’d proffer up my liver (& I do)—but you happened into a grave somewhere because of your liver. So tell me, what spare days are these? What morning as it breaks, breaks even with the night? II. I’m just one in a long line of people talking to the dead, making poems out of the dead because we don’t know what to do with ourselves. You sang beauty & nonsense, all dada & gay & god. Like just anyone could be all dada & gay & god. I learned early to apologize, to hide. This is not an apology, but it is a stance against ruin. A way to ask: is this truly the who I am? I’ve seen at least 12 days this month clouds in my place. III. Where I am, a madman has been ejected, taken away for talking in public of the devil, & of the twisted face that scared him, made him cry. It was, he said, a horror beyond words. His voice shook. He spat in a cup. I saw in his eyes, how powerful this devil was. He told me his name was Sunny (he had many names) that he was a painter, that we were friends, and how he would protect me from the devil. When the police came they explained to him, how he was not welcome how he made people (including me) uncomfortable. That if he came again it would be trespassing. He did not understand. All I wanted was coffee, he said. Can I not get coffee? Where will I go to get coffee? IV. It’s times like these I take you & I make a fantasy of junipers, instead; the tree that needs no tending, grows wherever there is sun: we could keep a field of them someplace calm and far from here. There was a juniper in my front yard when I was growing up, the whole place smelled like it. The first time I had gin I said it tasted like the past I said it tasted like old time. V. You said, going into hell so many times tears it, which explains poetry, which explains my disbelief in it, & explains how the logic of nonsense tears itself slowly from itself, building the same way, setting organ upon organ in a wet, red pile for the hollow-eyed gods. Jack, Prometheus’s eagle didn’t even like livers, but the gods didn’t care. So the eagle had to keep all those livers somewhere. This is the root of all Greek philosophy. How many livers do does it take to make a heap? If Prometheus grows a new liver is the old liver still the liver of Prometheus? What about the 3rd, the 5th? Somehow he’s both immortal & gone. All we have of Prometheus is the memory of his immortal liver and how his hand brushed fire across cities in the dark. We’re all in the dark here, looking for the dark. Prometheus is the origin of the lightbulb, the lamp, & the on /off switch. . VI. You said, time does not finish a poem—& it doesn’t. Maybe nothing does. Maybe a poem is longer than your nephew’s hat. Maybe it’s hot as the coffee of god, or the cigarettes in San Francisco where the ash falls like I do from the lips of someone speaking smoke. Maybe it all just shifts, slips through this or that & finds its continuing where it can. The boy in the poem is resourceful. He categorizes, makes lists, marks long & short & run along now he makes sense where he can. But a person is not a poem & people don’t finish poems either. I haven’t learned what does. When I asked, they told me hunger, fear, abandonment, exuberance & joy all finish poems. But I don’t know I just see words & movement cast in shapes through pages & through time. But isn’t it a long time, isn’t it forever, since you’ve been around. In another world, I could have known you, but I know your poems only. How you finished them, how they finished themselves or finished you—does it matter if I never know? Here, under the juniper, my alcoholic, my psychotic muse has a thing for you. VII. Jack, I guess it’s just us two Eurydices left under the juniper. Won’t somebody carry us out of hell, already? Won’t you sing to me? Here’s my liver, all in palm; my voice & body, up for Orpheus’s song. His voice is blooming in the rising tide & his song says winter & his song says yes & his song goes: under the flower of light, I saw time & under the flower of light, I bless’d time & under the flower the flower of light I came to know & recommend this life So let me say: fuck Orpheus. In that there is some consolation. It’s all just fear, Jack. Aren’t we all Eurydice, hating the lyre & the words not the glance that takes Orpheus away again toward the world that meant he could never be ours, that we could never live, never taste time’s slice and pretend that something has finality— but hating always the words time does not finish a poem and I am afraid. This is no place for bravery. What good is that when there is nowhere worse to go? Let us go down restless to the asphodel beds those vast, white, breezeless fields at the edge together so that we may lay forgetting, forever asking of anything at all, here, Are there junipers, here, in hell? VIII. In the distance are the doors, the empty shelves made from bright roots, the only remnants of that tree where we stand & keep; & keep & write. It’s winter now, the birds are not in flight any longer, only the snow flurries fly. You believed a holiday was like a snowstorm & that people ought to notice it. The juniper is just the juniper. My mind’s bent in toward sacred things, because it was taught to seek for sacred things. I never really knew if I could love a man. Five years, Jack & I had never heard of you. Five years were not a tunnel to another time, were not the fallen god, relit into a blossomed light. Five years were three suicides & no deaths & several new voices saying: where are the birds & gods, in brilliant reds, blacks, blues of hideous flight. We tunnel empty words through arid time they said & look about to pull. Another month I come like stars unbounded radiating light in particles & waves. My history is wider than its order & its lines. Five years now I look for you, but only here I’m pulling off my February face. IX. In this delusion my dirt hands are as the hands of god, umbilical & strung between this concrete place & one of vast, unfolding juniper. I look around, is this what I’ve been tending all this time, this harsh barked grove its thin splinters press my skin as I attempt to lean on one. In another morning I’ll have coffee, lemon bars the usual routine: it will be Thursday like it’s always Thursday. Right now, I’m watching god plant trees and it’s more real than anything I’ve ever known: my eyes are white as lightning; I die the slow death of Prometheus because I haven’t one to call my own. X. You have given me so much. Let’s fight about it. I believe in the fundamental irrelevance of people and of our unimportance. If anything means something it means too much & all because of us— or when you wrote pro / me / thee / us were you thinking now that’s honesty? XI. Waking, to an ochre light as streetlamps mingle with the early sun, in the dawn I am the pulse of my own living. You said words are what sticks to the real, words are what we use to drag the real into the poem. When Orpheus went back, I feared I would become a photograph of my own consumption. You fell like embers down amid a torrid haze, in your split page I looked on them, capturing neither the fall, nor the flickering. I can’t begin to think of urgency like this: another Thursday breaking, another blue strand of the eye. XII. Who sways now with song sways for no one behind but is behind look up the flaming breath of Prometheus is gone up to hide inside the vast expanse of dark & rest & you said & you said this is the end & poetry kept on the riot in the hazelnut XIII. I thought of you as a butterfly tonight with clipped wings your monarch colors spelled a hole left where I want to speak I can’t tell you that I love you that I don’t know what love would be between us but that to come to it in a single light to forge a false correspondence Jack—to have called you by your first name all this time to have reduced to a figure the implacable process of communication under the hill of our bodies under the foolishness & desire of bodies in the curve of sun is all so well but aren’t we all just looking for light in the language of yearning or is it a rain-filled place where you are giving way to me giving way to another giving way each drop giving its way to thunder & puddle where I have felt so small driven by doubt & a celebration of thought without angels & innumerable angels —poet you said be like god but I love chocolate & coffee & the unfinished curve of the “&” over itself & I’m a man in a way I barely understand & is god like that I don’t think so & don’t give a shit if you did but feel better for you & for me & for having been someone I love told me to write a poetry that uses all our intelligence—everything you know Jack I don’t know if I can I don’t know if the sun is as wide as I say I don’t know if I can sing dada to god I don’t know if losing myself in another is good & I don’t know if what is raw is raw because it is fast or what is raw is raw because it is somehow authentic Jack I am going as fast as I can I am warlike & weary I love the moon whose yellow eye shines on the hill of my body whose yellow eye shines the hill whose body is more yellow than god’s body Jack I don’t know if the blooming clouds will ever blossom or if the rain is the pollen of the sky I don’t know if what is beautiful is beautiful because I can’t explain it or if I haven’t thought enough about it Jack I know that men are tough and hardy and strong and all that but I’m tired of it I want to press my thin body into the wet & rain to grow on the hillside where there’s a willow grows aslant the brook I’m making coffee now the work is long & I have long to go & there you are saying time doesn’t finish a poem as you move toward Seattle borne on my gin angel beautiful as snow on Thursday morning when I am in the arms of another man & for once the work is cinnamon & coffee & the impossibility of holding both his hands at once while eating morning’s half-burnt toast XIV. Come on I have lain long enough & it’s time to get up but don’t think I won’t wish for you and all of this when my nostrils are empty of the asphodel and I’ve stepped out still alive & there’s the sun a tall woman getting out of the taxi cab of the sky with a cycle of poems burning under her arm I hear her whispering the cloudy jumble in my ears I slow myself to hear what has been said & make a correspondence to give to no one not even the empty sun that I will go to one day & have already been under It is a full day its space opens unexpectedly on another Today I scatter juniper berries among themselves among the impossible heap