This piece was originally published in Quarto’s 2022 Spring Print.
Illustration by Mel Wang
After Jack Spicer
I’d like You to settle down and begin with a goal.
I’d like to write a poem like California
in which raven in the bathtub
cannot see or hear its muttering
and is absent from the skull and there is no beak
no scene at all
only shine and fragment and is come together
like a paint-by-number headcold.
Good. Again.
I’d like to write a poem I haven’t seen before
in which the main character,
a doe or something I can hardly imagine,
is the hunter, using an axe like a unicorn
does or a sturgeon’s fin. I’d like whales to be involved.
drifting lazy feeding over feudal Japan or Normandy
or the Chesapeake where I’m lucky not to have drowned.
I’d like to parody Rimbaud before reading him, but it’s pronounced
Rum-bow or Ryan. And go back to kill
a consequential some one, a genie maybe, clutch time—
barren waste of fabric— in my teeth and
I begin to smell like smoke.
One more time.
with feeling.
I’d like to write a play with arsenic and magic markers
enter stage right
the ghost of something that is a lie
and then from there we have Hamlet.
What I’m saying is I’d like to write Hamlet.
And?
I’d like to write a poem where I finish speaking it
in ecstasy. like when I open up my Hopkins
or quote my girlfriends. I’d like to grab myself by the collar
and cast myself into the Hudson. like a skipping stone and then
I’d like to write a poem like how Ayn Rand wrote a poem
or shit on her grave. I’d like very much to do
both things and feel it happen. I’d like very much a fork
to pick up fingerfoods and to write about California
as though I’d been there. And I’d like to write about
something casual. Like proxy wars
or soapboxes or Yelp. I’d like to dissolve
the grime spots in the mirror and start again without color
but with feeling
You’re getting off track.
And I’d like to write a poem with three voices
Like this
in which they are not framed in any specific way?
exactly, one in which
they drift like it is 5 o’clock in autumn
and I am back on the blacktop
heaving paint into a saxophone I’ve forgotten how to play.
My knees are bleeding.
with little rocks dripping off them
and my fingers are chilled like beer cans
and the faux leather of my coat is beading sweat
up and down my arms and coating
me like I imagine California would hold
and I could tumble down San Francisco just like my eyes
would cascade down the mountain
or how when the fog Rolled into the Shenandoah valley
it was a stoic avalanche
like a Leonard Cohen piece and I wish
I had known about Leonard Cohen when I lived there
and I wish I had had more sex in High School
before college ruined it for me. And I’d like you to be there too.
Not you or me
yes you and whoever can be fooled
and the ones who see visions and the old ones
and it would be a great party where we would buy a lot
and not drink at all, starve in fact, deprive ourselves of comforts
like water and pretend that we are in fact
not American and pretend in fact that spirituality
is culpability. Then we’d be cooking.
I don’t think that’s enough.
I’d like to write one more poem
about a bird I saw
sitting in a tree who had died
long before I was born
and who is dead I’m sure
as well.
It was a raven.
and my sister in grade school shouted up to it in reply
in the mist on the mountainside
pluming with a cough
and I forget what she said
but she turned to me and told me
didn’t you know they taught me how to speak crow ?
Joan Tate is a graduate of Columbia College with a degree in Creative Writing Poetry. She currently attends UMass Amherst's Poetry MFA. When she isn't writing about the ebullient bewilderment of bodies in time she can be found wandering Riverside Park and admiring its many raccoons.