Orfeo

Jack Spicer

1925 –

1965

Sharp as an arrow Orpheus
Points his music downward.
Hell is there
At the bottom of the seacliff.
Heal
Nothing by this music.
Eurydice
Is a frigate bird or a rock or some seaweed.
Hail nothing
The infernal
Is a slippering wetness out at the horizon.
Hell is this:
The lack of anything but the eternal to look at
The expansiveness of salt
The lack of any bed but one’s
Music to sleep in.

From A Book of Music by Jack Spicer. As printed in The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer from Wesleyan University Press, 2008. Used by permission.

Improvisations On A Sentence By Poe

"Indefiniteness is an element of the true music."
The grand concord of what
Does not stoop to definition.  The seagull
Alone on the pier cawing its head off
Over no fish, no other seagull,
No ocean.  As absolutely devoid of meaning
As a French horn.
It is not even an orchestra.  Concord
Alone on a pier.  The grand concord of what
Does not stoop to definition.  No fish
No other seagull, no ocean—the true
Music.

Jack Spicer

2008

A Book of Music

Coming at an end, the lovers
Are exhausted like two swimmers. Where
Did it end? There is no telling. No love is
Like an ocean with the dizzy procession of the waves’ boundaries
From which two can emerge exhausted, nor long goodbye
Like death.
Coming at an end. Rather, I would say, like a length

Jack Spicer

1958

Poems

Orfeo

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Improvisations On A Sentence By Poe

A Book of Music

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