Six Poems for Poetry Chicago: I-IV

Painting by Noredin Morgan

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 fed for themselves.
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 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 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.


Jack Spicer

Published over on Jack Spicer Homepage



published 1965
copyright © 1975 by the Estate of Jack Spicer
reprinted from The Collected Books of Jack Spicer with the permission of Black Sparrow Press
all materials reprinted with the kind permission of Robin Blaser