A Book of Music by Jack Spicer

A Book of Music

Coming to 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, no long goodbye

Like death.

Coming at an end. Rather, I would say, like a length

Of coiled rope

Which does not disguise in the final twists of its lengths

Its endings.

But, you will say, we loved

And some parts of us loved

And the rest of us will remain

Two persons. Yes,

Poetry ends like a rope.

Jack Spicer, my vocabulary did this to me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, ed. by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 178.