Radar

Radar


A Postscript for Marianne Moore
by Jack Spicer

No one exactly knows
Exactly how clouds look in the sky
Or the shape of the mountains below them
Or the direction in which fish swim.
No one exactly knows.
The eye is jealous of whatever moves
And the heart
Is too far buried in the sand
To tell.

They are going on a journey
Those deep blue creatures
Passing us as if they were sunshine
Look
Those fins, those closed eyes
Admiring each last drop of the ocean.

I crawled into bed with sorrow that night
Couldn’t touch his fingers. See the splash
Of the water
The noisy movement of cloud
The push of the humpbacked mountains
Deep at the sand’s edge.


Published over on the Poetry Foundation

Jack Spicer, “Radar” from My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poems of Jack Spicer (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008). Used by permission of Peter Gizzi for The Estate of Jack Spicer.