Sample Poems by Barry Spacks

Fame

Wearing my soft black Australian hat
I walk my friends’ dog down Panchita Street.
I’ve been house-sitting, dog-walking, reading all week
Richard Brautigan, who wrote that the beauty
is all in the saying, who would not tie
the bird of lunacy by a short string
to his toe, but rather would let her fly
in long loopy moves like a book’s page-turning,
all in the name and the acting-out
of freedom – who shot off his head absolutely,
done in, they say, by the Bitch-Fame-Goddess,
broken on her gerbil treadwheel,
depressed, uncheered, remaining a time
unidentified, so de-headed there
and vodka-drowned and Not, in Bolinas,
California – talk about freedom!

I think he would have liked my hat
and surely my friends’ dog Ida, black-and-white
border collie with yearning eyes
who’d herd anything to safety, sheep
or striver, doing her dog-work. “Fame
is the spur,” blind Milton wrote, but added
little of use in Bolinas.

Labels

The words we use we become,
shaped by sound after sound,

by the choice of a theme, by the placing
of a comma.

But this apple’s stuck-on label –
damned thing makes the apple

less real. Some spin-meister works there
diminishing native eloquence,

glues his sticky concept-thing
on the apple, intent to interfere.

And so many people
transformed into labels!

(how does it feel to be forced to wear
a Yellow Star?)

Or they’ll label themselves,
they’re walking billboards:

“Buy this niche-demographic here!”
“Bargain Days!” “Choose Me!”

O, clean us, release us again to be
taste, color, miracle, each

unmarked dear one shining
like an apple.

Getting It Right

There’s this woman in a book by Don DeLillo
who’s busy trying to describe the smell
of soya granules sprinkled, health-nut-fashion,
on her morning cereal.

She thinks the smell lies somewhere
“between body odor, yes,
in the lower extremities
and some authentic pod life on the earth.”

She, of course, must smell exactly
like one more version of the novelist DeLillo,
who here pretends to be a woman
closing eyes to concentrate,

hoping to perceive and name
in the devoted litmus-fashion
of all delvers, rememberers, those
who labor to get it right;

as, for example, what accounts
for my affection for the Berkshire Hills? –
a fondness involved
with a town called Goshen

and the fact that tart old Melville
lived in Pittsfield nearby,
plus the white-water tumble
down Chesterfield Gorge...
let me close my eyes to try to catch it
among the many shades
of worldly love’s exactitudes,
this westward-leaning Massachusetts dusk.

Tree-Lovers

A man fell in love with an Ironwood tree,
hugged her where she motionlessly

endured his passion, as if she’d say
“Dude, it will never work, we haven’t

anywhere enough in common,
you with your leap-about

monkey-mind
and me with a sap-flow like humming.”

*
In this folktale I’m inventing, a woman
marries a tree, clears up its leaves,

waters its roots and glories to see
its great spring-summer burgeoning.

It made, she felt, the best of husbands:
silent except in storms of wind,

rooted firm to be leaned upon,
never tempted to sneak down an alley

though naked
and willing to burn.

*
City trees, they care for us,
their green and bloom an offering,

street after shaded street, yielding
a sort of saintedness, as if

they meant to croon to us in our rush:
“There, there, busy-ones...breathe.”

After an Ancient Text

Two silly minor gods
decided to check out Shui Ma,

known on earth, in heaven
for her magic, her beauty.

Now when gods, even minor, boyish gods,
visit humans, they must get

exactly whatever it is
they want:

reverence, room-service –
no argument.

So when these two ordered
“The best food known to mortals,

and let it be served by Shui Ma...
plus wait, oh yes,

have her come to us
in stirring nakedness,”

naked and smiling she served them,
godlings transformed by her magic

to babes
she fed at her breasts.