AN ELEGY FOR JACK SPICER
The poem ends when the feeling’s gone.
When the little boats enter
the Tunnel of Love
empty, driven
by some vast clanking machinery
like the heart.
Like the darkness that comes for your bones
when you’re lost
in the tunnel alone.
Carnivals. Poems. Whiskey and blood.
The little girl who wanted to dance at all the parties.
The little boy who slept on her grave.
Dreaming them
as the garbage truck grinds up Cummings Road,
rumbling toward the dump
with a load of spoiled honey,
with lemons and seagulls and funhouse mirrors,
old love letters and busted luck.
Dreaming the boy and girl holding hands
as their little boat enters
the tunnel where language is not enough to save you.
Trying to hold on to their hands
and the darkness and the tunnel and the feeling.
Alice-in-Wonderland hacked to pieces
and buried under the parking lot.
The first lunatic ghoul of a phoneme
screaming in the black tunnel.
Trying to balance
the elegant bone-crystal power of the simple
and the howl clawing your lungs.
Between heartbeat and silence and another
ragged heartbeat
holding on to the torn ticket for dear life.
Waiting all night for the word that meant
little girl dancing, that led the readers
among wizards and demons, helped them
fashion their own faces from the mud.
The poem ends when the feeling’s gone.
When the ruined body collapses in the elevator,
beaten by poems and darkness,
by lovers and whiskey and mirrors,
by the playful glittering nonsense
and the infinitely small vocabulary of our feelings.
The tunnel where words mean nothing. No thing. None.
Not the boy or girl or the bones of their hands
picked clean.
Unable to speak the feelings that bear them,
breath-to-breath the poem goes on,
into the carnival romance, the danger and blood,
the black tunnel,
the Tunnel of Love,
the tunnels we dig toward each other
in the darkness holding hands.
That’s the faith exacted
to endure the famined Sabbath of night,
to wait for the word,
sing for it, cry for it,
beg and curse,
persisting even as we’re slaughtered,
even as we fall.