Jack Spicer.

“Imagine Lucifer . . .”

Imagine Lucifer

An angel without angelness

An apple

Plucked clear by will of taste, color,

Strength, beauty, roundness, seed

Absent of all God painted, present everything

An apple is.

Imagine Lucifer

An angel without angelness

A poem

That has revised itself out of sound

Imagine, rhyme, concordance

Absent of all God spoke of, present everything

A poem is.

                            The law I say, the Law

Is?

What is Lucifer

An emperor with no clothes

No skin, no flesh, no heart

An emperor!

-Jack Spicer

Robert Creeley

This man rarely leaves my mind, or my pen.  As I work towards an understanding (read: impossibility of grasping air) of how remembering works, and with my mother’s fading memory, this poem cuts into my mind and leaves its own stones.

 

“I Keep to Myself Such Measures…”

I keep to myself such
measures as I care for,
daily the rocks
accumulate position.

There is nothing
but what thinking makes
it less tangible. The mind,
fast as it goes, loses

pace, puts in place of it
like rocks simple markers,
for a way only to
hopefully come back to

where it cannot. All
forgets. My mind sinks.
I hold in both hands such weight
it is my only description.