Six Poems for Poetry Chicago
1
“Limon tree very pretty
And the limon flower is sweet
But the fruit of the poor lemon
Is impossible to eat”
In Riverside we saved the oranges first (by smudging) and left
the lemons last to fend for them selves. They didn’t usually
A no good crop. Smudge-pots
Didn’t rouse them. The music
Is right though. The lemon tree
Could branch off into real magic. Each flower in place. We
Were sickened by the old lemon.
2
Pieces of the past arising out of the rubble. Which evokes Eliot
and then evokes Suspicion. Ghosts all of them. Doers of no
good.
The past around us is deeper than.
Present events defy us, the past
Has no such scruples. No funeral processions for him. He died
in agony. The cock under the thumb.
Rest us as corpses
We poets
Vain words.
For a funeral (as I live and breathe and speak)
Of good
And impossible
Dimensions.
3
In the far, fat Vietnamese jungles nothing grows.
In Guadacanal nothing grew but a kind of shrubbery that was
like the bar-conversation of your best friend who was
not able to talk.
3
Sheets to the wind. No
Wind being present.
No
Lifeboats being present. A jungle
Can’t use life-boats. Dead
From whatever bullets the snipers were. Each
Side of themselves. Safe-
Ly delivered.
4
The rind (also called the skin) of the lemon is difficult to
understand
It goes around itself in an oval quite unlike the orange which, as
anyone can tell, is a fruit easily to be eaten.
It can be crushed in canneries into all sorts of extracts which are
still not lemons. Oranges have no such fate. They’re pretty
much the same as they were. Culls become frozen orange
juice. The best oranges are eaten.
It’s the shape of the lemon, I guess that causes trouble. It’s
ovalness, it’s rind. This is where my love, somehow, stops.
5
A moment’s rest. I can’t get a moment’s rest without sleeping
with you. Yet each moment
Seems so hard to figure. Clocks
Tell time. In elaborate ceremonial they tick the seconds off
what was to come.
Wake us at six in the morning with messages someone had given
them the night before.
To pierce the darkness you need a clock that tells good time.
Something in the morning to hold on to
As one gets craftier in poetry one sees the obvious messages
(cocks for clocks) but one forgets the love that gave them
Time.
6
The moment’s rest. And the bodies entangled and yet not
entangled in sleeping. Could we get
Out of our skins and dance? The bedclothes
So awry that they seem like two skins.
Or all the sorts of skins that we wore, wear (the orgasm),
wanted to wear, or would be wearing. So utterly tangled.
A bad dream.
A moment’s rest. The skins
All of them
Near.
I saw the ghost of myself and the ghost of yourself dancing
without music.
With
Out
Skin.
A good dream. The
Moment’s rest.
poem by Jack Spicer
Added by Poetry Lover
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