Till the Real Thing Comes Along.
"A Postscript to the Berkeley Renaissance
What have I lost? When shall I start to sing
A loud and idiotic song that makes
The heart rise frightened into poetry
Like birds disturbed?
I was a singer once. I sang that song.
I saw the thousands of bewildered birds
Breaking their cover into poetry
Up from the heart.
What have I lost? We lived in forests then,
Naked as jaybirds in the ever-real,
Eating our toasted buns and catching flies,
And sometimes angels, with our hooting tongues.
I was a singer once. In distant trees
We made the forests ring with sacred noise
Of gods and bears and swans and sodomy,
And no one but a bird could hear our voice.
What have I lost? The trees were full of birds.
We sat there drinking at the sour wine
In gallon bottles. Shouting song
Until the hunters came.
I was a singer once, bird-ignorant.
Time with a gun said, 'Stop,
Find other forests. Teach the innocent.'
God got another and a third
Birdlimed in Eloquence.
What have I lost? At night my hooting tongue,
Naked of feathers and of softening years,
Sings through the mirror at me like a whippoorwill
And then I cannot sleep.
'I was a singer once,' it sings.
'I sing the song that every captured tongue
Sang once when free and wants again to sing.
But I can sing no song I have not sung.'
What have I lost? Spook singer, hold your tongue.
I sing a newer song no ghost-bird sings.
My tongue is sharpened on the iron's edge.
Canaries need no trees. They have their cage."
--Jack Spicer, 1954
"If Pessoa promoted Sebastianism, it's not because he believed in it but because he didn't." --Richard Zenith, intro to Fernando Pessoa: Selected Poems
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