Poem for Jack Spicer
It's the start of baseball season, and I am thinking again as I do every year in early April now that I live in California where afternoon is a blue span to languidly cross of those long ones you used to sort of sleep through getting drunk on many beers, lying next to your radio on a little square of grass in the sun, listening half to the game and half to the Pacific water gently slapping the concrete barrier of the man-made cove. I have heard it and it sounds like conversations among not there people I can't quite hear. But you could. And later you would try to remember what they said and transcribe it on your black typewriter in your sad, horrible room. When I read your poems about suicide and psychoanalysis I feel very lucky and ashamed to be alive at all. Everyone has been talking lately about radiation, iodine, and wind, and you are in your grave, far from the water. I know I don't care about you at all but when I look at your photograph, your round head tilted up so you are staring down at everyone, I remember how much you hated your body. Today I will go down by the water where you used to sit and think I do not hate my body even though I often do. When I die please write he tried on whatever stone you choose.
Credit
Copyright © 2010 by Matthew Zapruder. Used with permission of the author.
Author
Matthew Zapruder

Matthew Zapruder is the author of several books of poetry, including Come On All You Ghosts (Copper Canyon Press, 2010).
Date Published: 2010-01-01
Source URL: https://poets.org/poem/poem-jack-spicer