Anyone Can Write a Poem

At last, there is a new volume of Jack Spicer’s writings. With Be Brave to Things (Wesleyan University Press, 2021), edited by scholar Daniel Katz, Spicer joins that select group of poets blessed by the publication of uncollected work. In this case, Be Brave to Things is both an uncollected poems and a trio of uncollected plays, appended generously by Katz’s introduction and meticulous notes. The book demonstrates the enduring appeal of a cult figure of postwar American poetics, whose early death in relative obscurity might have meant oblivion for a poet of lesser talents. However, Fate—shall we call her Kevin Killian, who tirelessly edited and championed posthumous editions of Spicer’s work?—has clearly had her way. It’s what Spicer knew, that he’d never be finished with us, as in these lines from “Song for Bird and Myself”:

But the poem isn’t over.
It keeps going
Long after everybody
Has settled down comfortably into laughter.
The bastards
On the other side of the paper
Keep laughing.
LISTEN.
STOP LAUGHING.
THE POEM ISN’T OVER …

Spicer’s return to print is the stuff of legend and a tribute to the power of collective effort. In 1965, at age 40, the alcoholic Spicer collapsed into a coma and was admitted to the poverty ward of San Francisco General Hospital. By then he had published a handful of brief (though wondrous) books that largely circulated in the Bay Area. Following his death, a handful of small magazines produced special issues dedicated to Spicer’s poetry, a stream of tributes that started with Clayton Eshleman’s Caterpillar in 1970 and Paul Mariah’s Manroot in 1975. Soon after, Black Sparrow published The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, which included Robin Blaser’s essay “The Practice of Outside,” an authoritative account of Spicer’s poetics. In 1980, Donald Allen’s Grey Fox Press published One Night Stand & Other Poems, a collection of short lyrics that Spicer compared to “one night stands,” poems that, in Spicer’s words, “belong nowhere … pointing nowhere, as meaningless as sex in a Turkish bath.”

Though some readers may disagree about the extent to which intercourse in a bathhouse might be meaningless, Spicer clearly meant to draw a line between the writing he collected into “books”—the serial poetry that began with After Lorca in 1957—and the poetry pushed by “the English Department of the spirit—that great quagmire that lurks at the bottom of all of us.” Before it was possible to store and share PDFs with such promiscuity or quickly access institutional archives from anywhere in the world, The Collected Books of Jack Spicer and One Night Stand afforded readers a direct experience of Spicer’s poetry, keeping his name and work in print for at least another generation. The ongoing Spicer revival really picked up steam in the late 1990s, led by Killian and Lew Ellingham, who wrote the biography Poet Be Like God (1998), and Peter Gizzi, who edited a collection of lectures, The House That Jack Built (1998). In 2010, Killian and Gizzi edited My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer. And earlier this year, New York Review Books reissued After Lorca.

Spicer has been the subject of an often bifurcated criticism. One clique of critics tends to wax on about his delightfully outlandish philosophies about poetry (Martians on the radio!); another parses his relationship to gay life and politics. While I was revising this essay, the scholar Daniel Benjamin pointed me to the heated fallout from comments by Larry Oakner, who wrote in the Spicer issue of Manroot, “The fact remains that Spicer was a homosexual; though his sexual preference has little to do with his writing, the fact does illuminate several obscure relationships or allusions.” Of course, there has been a great deal of overlap (if not consensus) between the Spicer-philes of the gay liberation era on the one hand and those more enamored with Spicer’s poetics on the other. A subsequent generation of scholars—including Maria Damon, Michael Davidson, and later John Vincent Emil, Michael Snediker, and Christopher Nealon—eventually overturned this divided criticism. Today, there is no need to choose between or contrast the two historical approaches. Seemingly in response to any such false choice, editor John Vincent Emil writes in his introduction to After Spicer (2011):

Earlier critics have done a fine job of introducing readers to Spicer; now it is the task of critics to bring them to his poetry qua poetry, while also doing justice to the biographical and philosophical. The relation of biography to oeuvre is especially difficult in Spicer’s case, since he made such strong claims about the relation of life and work. He insists this relation is, above all, vexed and opaque.

Still, even if the generation of critics that followed Spicer’s death perpetuated a dichotomized representation of his life and work (one that Spicer himself would have sneered at), those tendencies have nevertheless shaped the poet’s posthumous reception. In his recent review of the Steve Abbott reader (Beautiful Aliens, edited by Jamie Townsend), literary scholar Kaplan Harris writes, “[t]oday Spicer is a darling of Ivy-pedigreed exegetes, but it has to be remembered that for decades his poetry almost exclusively circulated among small press subcultures, and even then, mostly among a gay liberation readership.” An irony emerges when one contrasts the support Spicer’s poetry has received from scholars publishing monographs with university presses (such as Wesleyan, Harvard, Chicago, and Edinburgh) with Spicer’s disdain for the publishing houses and academic establishment of his day. For some of us, the academy’s embrace of Spicer comes not without some indignation. Remember that when Ellingham and Killian submitted Poet Be Like God to a university press, the manuscript was initially rejected. (Though it, too, was ultimately published by Wesleyan in 1998.) In a 2013 interview with poet Joseph Bradshaw, Killian certainly hadn’t let the matter go:

It has been sort of strange watching someone enter the canon, so to speak, since over the years as I have kept working on Spicer—even vaguely and without official sanction—his stock has largely risen, and you see him included in anthologies now, in general histories of the period, indeed he has become a general fact of the weather, a rather different situation to the one that prevailed some years back when an academic reader declined our biography of Spicer on the grounds that he was a ‘coterie poet,’ whose work had appeal only to a ‘handful of California homosexuals.’

So, to whom might Be Brave to Things appeal? A handful of California homosexuals? Let’s hope so! And I urge all of you (you know who you are) to tune into blush-lit.com, where you can now listen to Killian reading the uncollected poem “Goodnight (I Want to Kill Myself),” featuring these perfect lines:

I have seen enough of you, good night
I have seen that anyone can write a poem.
Hart Crane died so that faggots could write poetry.
And faggots have written poetry

For now, it’s likely that Be Brave to Things will appeal mostly to Spicer scholars and completists, whether homosexual or otherwise, as there is so much in this volume to study. There is, for example, the curious artifact of Spicer’s undergraduate years at UC Berkeley, Collected Poems 1945-1946, a one-of-a-kind Christmas gift he gave to his professor-heroine Josephine Miles, reprinted here in its entirety. There is also “The Trojan Wars Renewed: A Capitulation, or The Dunkiad,” a “mock-epic” poem epitomizing the queer pomposity of the Berkeley Renaissance, which Blaser singled out for publication in the appendix to The Collected Books of Jack Spicer. There’s a trail of little sparklies worthy of reconsideration, such as this brief untitled poem that features Spicer’s early study in rhyme and ritual, figuring the sexy melancholy of cruising in a register akin to that of a children’s story:

These woods, so fit for emperors, reveal
A thousand detailed alleyways where we feel
Each other waiting.
Believe these royal woods, remember them.
Where we have never been is real.

Any fan of Spicer will be reminded of his letter to the deceased Federico García Lorca: “I would like to make poems out of real objects. … I would like to point to the real, disclose it, to make a poem that has no sound in it but the pointing of a finger.” In this untitled poem written in the years before After Lorca, might there be something of Spicer’s masterpiece? Like the date of the poem itself (1955?), the correspondence between these two elements seems plausible. If it could, the whole of Be Brave to Things would sing fully fortissimo with the echoes (and birds and oceans and winsome boys) that recur throughout Spicer’s poetry.

Of the approximately 200 pages of poetry in this volume, more than half were written before Spicer’s return to San Francisco from Boston in 1956. That is, with a few exceptions, most of the poems presented here were those Spicer denounced as “one night stands.” This might give some readers pause, but Katz has endorsed queer theorist’s Michael Snediker’s opinion that Spicer’s “renunciation” of his early poetry ought to be met with skepticism. Indeed, there may be more continuity in Spicer’s career as a poet than he would have had his readers believe. “The turning point,” Snediker suggests, “while on some level formally or biographically significant, oversimplifies Spicer’s poetic trajectory.” Katz takes the issue even further by reminding readers of the “radical and far-reaching aspects of Spicer’s poetics.” That is, Spicer’s theorization of the “book,” a collection of poems organized into “a looser, more flexible structure, capable of giving amplitude to the effects of echo, repetition, digression, and return. … Spicer asks us to read his ‘books’ as something other than simply longer lyrics, and by the same token, belatedly invites us to read his early works beyond the boundaries of the isolated poem.”

The belatedness of Spicer’s invitation to imagine a book of early poems (or, better, to imagine his early work as a “book”) is especially important to Katz’s analysis of Spicer’s early work, which Katz suggests constitutes a kind of ghosted book, one that “haunts” Spicer’s poetry into its maturity. Katz writes that the “task, then, is to read this ‘book of early poems’ quite clearly in its status as something which does not exist: as the phantom that foretells Spicer’s mature practice, but which also, in its very virtuality, haunts any pretensions the later ‘books’ might have to totality.” Although it seems perfectly fair to ask why anyone would bother with Spicer’s early poems, given their author’s summary dismissal, it must be said that it does not require much grace to appreciate the charms of Spicer’s early poetry. After all, this is the period during which Spicer penned the miniature classics “Berkeley in a Time of Plague” and “Psychoanalysis: An Elegy” in addition to those poems that had been the most widely disseminated at the time of his death, the first of the “Imaginary Elegies.” Be Brave to Things includes an early version of these “Imaginary Elegies,” offering more to study of Spicer’s editorial decisions.

In addition to his labors as an editor, Katz brings to Be Brave to Things his theory of “unpublishing” Spicer. Inspired by Emily Dickinson’s habit of including her poems in personal correspondence (Katz notes that Spicer studied Dickinson in Boston), the idea of “unpublishing” distinguishes Be Brave to Things from other volumes of uncollected poems, such as those of James Schuyler (Other Flowers, edited by James Meetze and Simon Pettet) or Frank O’Hara (Poems Retrieved, edited by Donald Allen). For those projects, editors had either discovered poems in university archives or “retrieved” them from obscure print magazines and/or personal correspondence. Reasonably, the editors of Other Flowers and Poems Retrieved celebrate their respective uncollected poems for their exceptional quality, consistent with the excellence of the authors’ published works. Katz, however, manages a more fraught position with respect to Spicer’s stated intentions about his poetry and poetics:

For Spicer, the fact of a poem being ‘good’ doesn’t make it worth saving, as that very criterion of isolated value is what he rejects. … There is no escaping the fact that a book such as [Be Brave to Things] violates core principles of Spicer’s sense of the possibilities of poetry; it also violates core principles of Spicer’s sense of poetry’s limitations. Its very form makes fewer claims than those on which Spicer insisted, while at the same time affirming a timeless, ideal potency of the poetic, which Spicer scorned. My hope is that this book will endure, however, not as a betrayal of Spicer, but rather as a failed monument to the failure of the poetic which Spicer paradoxically championed. And that it will serve as a homage to and additional instance of the relentless battle Spicer’s work, when at its best, waged against itself.

That said, casual readers may want to skip from Katz’s introduction to Spicer’s more mature work, the poems from San Francisco and Berkeley of 1956 to 1965, among which are four serial poems: “An Exercise,” “The Clock Jungle,” “Spider Music,” and “For Major General Abner Doubleday Inventor of Baseball and First American President of the Theosophical Society,” all written in the last decade of Spicer’s life. Excluding “An Exercise,” these series have not been published previously nor have the fragments that comprise the terrific serial work “A New Poem.” At last it’s here, new poetry from Jack Spicer:           

Then
What is an angel
It is easy to say that he is a messenger, a postman
Delivering all sorts of important and unimportant letters
Some of which will change your life. Or your death for that matter:
Overdue bills, an unexpected postcard, the kind of thing anybody
           with sense would leave in his mailbox until he could sort
           them out
This is the mailbox, of course
This is my mailbox
This is the angel.

Let’s indulge. Here’s a bit more:

There is room for wonder. I am beginning to have a cold.
Can you put everything into a poem
Or do the words resist you? Pine needles
Will be at the edge of the forest. Make
Each vowel sound (each heart) as likely
To burn.

From Katz’s editorial notes, we learn that Spicer’s “A New Poem” “was written in late summer or autumn 1958 in a notebook in which the poems are interspersed with some of the later pieces from Fifteen False Propositions Against God; drafts of letters to his former boyfriend Russell Fitzgerald, whose rupture with Spicer informs the entire notebook; and the poem ‘For Steve Jonas Who Is in Jail for Defrauding a Book Club,’ as well as other material that does not unequivocally belong to the ‘New Poem’ project.” Thus, the title of “A New Poem,” repeated throughout the fragments, might be a matter of intention and evocation, willing this to be a new poem and not that other bundle of texts. “A New Poem” “presents insuperable editorial problems,” which Katz details (e.g., ordering), concluding that “short of the miraculous appearance of another manuscript in a more reliable state, any publication of the poem is inevitably an editorial fabrication, based on no solid principles or evidence.” More specters, of course, as Katz’s iteration of “A New Poem” is haunted by a total version that moves among and between fragments and loose appendages.

As ghostly as it may be, Be Brave to Things constructs an honest portrait of Spicer—at his best and, undoubtedly, his worst. Along with the distinctive if benign elements Spicer returned to throughout his writings (those echoing birds and oceans and winsome boys), there is also his anti-Semitism. It, too, appears as a recurring motif throughout Be Brave to Things, as does his Orientalism and anti-Blackness. “How racist was Spicer?” Ellingham and Killian asked in Poet Be Like God, and their conclusion, “Opinions vary,” is supported by anecdotes of and testimony from Amiri Baraka, Jim Herndon, Stephen Jonas, Bob Kaufman, and Ron Loewinsohn, among others. Be Brave to Things offers important additional evidence of what Ellingham and Killian characterize as Spicer’s “provocations.” Take, for example, this untitled poem (“I feel a black incubus…”):

I feel a black incubus crawling
Into my American bed
It is the color the newspapers describe
Of an atomic bomb explosion
Or the color of the full moon
In the night in which I cannot describe my lover.
He is the color of when I close my eyes
Or the little bowl of spit which tells you not to write poetry
Or the loss of hope—or
The single bullet that is going to kill every fucking person in the world
        who is not named Garcia Lorca.

Yes, opinions will vary about the extent to which (and, perhaps, whether) this short poem can be read as a statement of Spicer’s anti-Blackness. In this poem, Spicer inverts the apocalypse of nuclear war into the “night in which I cannot describe my lover.” If readers are familiar with Spicer’s biography (and given Spicer’s emphasis on the social life of poetry, his intended audience would have been), they might read this outtake from After Lorca in light of the frustrated erotic triangle of Spicer, Fitzgerald, and Beat poet Bob Kaufman. As Spicer’s biography has it, Kaufman commanded Fitzgerald’s erotic attention whenever he was near, much to Spicer’s chagrin. Spicer was outright nasty to Kaufman as a result. With respect to this untitled poem, no date is given for its composition, so it’s difficult if not impossible to verify Kaufman’s presence in San Francisco at the time.

Like Kaufman in Spicer’s own life, a spirit of sexual frustration inspires rage and hopelessness. I wouldn’t want a limited biographical reading of this rather ambiguous poem to be the determining factor in anyone’s opinions about Spicer’s bigotry, but, as Spicer himself theorized with respect to the best of his best poetry, there are correspondences. See also Spicer’s short poem for Kaufman, “For Bob,” which begins “No Negro / Walking in the jungle of his lack of passion / Can believe the beautiful banyan root of dream” and ends “Your black color / Won’t frighten the worms you could not have invented.” In this poem, Spicer encases Kaufman inside Blackness, and there he is left for the worms.

Though little in Katz’s introduction answers the question of why readers should take up Spicer’s uncollected poems now, I want to suggest, as one consideration among many, that Spicer’s poetry offers several striking figurations of race that speak to the foundational whiteness of the postwar literary avant-garde. (As if we needed more!) Though Be Brave to Things does not fundamentally change readers’ understanding of Spicer’s attitudes toward racialized others, this volume, like Poet Be Like God and My Vocabulary Did This to Me, adds new evidence that scholars and readers may benefit from in their studies of the racialization of American poetics, including Katz’s commentary. In his notes on “For Bob,” Katz indicts Spicer’s racism while contextualizing the poem with biographical and intertextual details: “[W]hile Spicer’s ‘white-splaining’ here, if campy, is still highly offensive, this poem also engages with Kaufman quite seriously in several important ways.” Katz posits that “For Bob” intimates a certain respect for Kaufman’s choice to transmit his work primarily through recitation (rather than print publication) as well as a sympathetic familiarity with Kaufman’s poetry, specifically, from “I, Too, Know What I Am Not.” Available anew in the Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman (2019), here are the final lines of Kaufman’s poem, which remains a powerful antidote to the racist appropriations and well-meaning leftism of the New American poets:

No, I am not shriek of Bantu children, bent
         under pennywhistle whips.
No, I am not whisper of the African trees,
         leafy Congo telephones.
No, I am not Leadbelly of blues, escaped from guitar jails.
No, I am not anything that is anything that I am not.

Be Brave to Things also includes three of Spicer’s plays: Young Goodman Brown, Pentheus and the Dancers, and Troilus. In response to the question “Why Spicer now?” I strongly suggest the plays as another place to look for answers. Even though Spicer has not (yet?) been remembered as a particularly gifted playwright, his Pentheus and Troilus are nevertheless stirring portraits of the Cold War dressed in the garb of ancient Greek tragedies. In Spicer’s retelling of Euripides’s The Bacchae, the faithless Pentheus comes to resemble J. Edgar Hoover, whose paranoid fury belied a not-so-secret curiosity about those he persecuted. Disguised as “The Stranger,” Dionysus taunts the king of Thebes:

STRANGER: Would you like to see them lying out there in the mountain forest?
PENTHEUS: I certainly would. I’d give somebody a great deal of gold if I could manage that.
STRANGER: You seem to have a sudden love for them.
PENTHEUS: I hate the sight of drunken women.
STRANGER: And yet you would like to see something that you hate.
PENTHEUS: I certainly would like to hide behind the pines and watch them.

Soon enough, Pentheus rushes into his palace to don the dress of the revelers he despises. Eventually it will be reported back to Thebes that the king has been torn to shreds by the feral community of women and worshippers on the outskirts of town. Just a beat before that, though, Pentheus asks the Stranger, “How do I look? Do I look as beautiful as my sister? Do I walk with the dignity of my mother?” to which Dionysus replies, “You look like both of them. I’m afraid that lock of hair isn’t quite in place.” This is perhaps another bit of life and work conjoining, as the drama brings to mind an anecdote from Spicer’s Berkeley years, which Blaser recounts in Miriam Nichols’s recent Blaser biography, Mechanic of Splendor (2019):

And then Jack arrives, because Jack had been given a part in Duncan’s masque and Jack gets to read the part of the muse herself, so Jack arrives looking very pink, and he has on a very tight swimming suit. It wasn’t a bikini in those days, but it was extremely tight, and that’s all. He arrived at my house and something had to be done. … It wasn’t quite adequate for the muse, but anyway I got a lampshade which fit his head perfectly and got out a crystal bangle of some kind off something, it must have been a chandelier in the apartment, and hung that by string down on his forehead and then we walked all across campus, through the library with Jack as Venus the muse herself.

Spicer’s Pentheus is fine, but the real gem is Troilus, and Spicer agreed. In the letter to Blaser in which Spicer dismissed his “one night stands,” it was only his newest poetry and his beloved Troilus that he still admitted. In his iteration of the story, Spicer reimagines the battle of the Trojan War separated into a locker room for the Greeks and a boardroom for the Trojans. (I like to believe that pornographer Joe Gage, in one of his more baroque moments, would have been inspired by Spicer’s mixture of suits and jocks—a chef’s kiss for this apogee of homosociality.) Ostensibly, Troilus is the tragic love story of Troilus and Cressida, quasi-star-crossed lovers whose doom was earlier narrated by Chaucer and Shakespeare, though Spicer’s Troilus (to whose surprise?) is quite a bit more gay-friendly than his predecessors’ versions. The Greek super soldiers Achilles and Patroclus are the only true lovers in Spicer’s play, considering Troilus’s affections for Cressida seem to be inspired by the goddess Aphrodite.

Troilus is considered one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays,” and Spicer doesn’t do much to round out the jagged edges. Indeed, it seems that he enjoys the mess he must write himself out of and through. To this end, Troilus is not so much a character study of a tragic protagonist as that of a trickster whose actions give shape to the motives and problems of those around him. Everyone is caught (even the gods?) in the endless war of Troy, and Troilus’s recklessness and indifference underscore how vain are the virtues of his compatriots and enemies. The fidelity of Patroclus, the might of Achilles, the cleverness of Ulysses, the faith of Calchas: all lead to ruin, a broken world that no human power can heal. Like Pentheus, Troilus must make his way to the gods—voices from the outside. Pentheus and Troilus are both dioramas of the unending war that the New American poets experienced midcentury and beyond as World War II quickly became the Cold War: an unending tumult of imperialism, violence, propaganda, misinformation, and jingoism that feels so painfully like the tumult we endure today. (For more in this vein, readers should find a copy of Stephan Delbos’s excellent recent monograph The New American Poetry and Cold War Nationalism.) In the final moments of Troilus, Zeus gets Troilus to make his wish:

ZEUS: Well, what do you want? This is your last chance.
TROILUS: If all this has to go on—Let the war end.
ZEUS: The war end? You’re wasting your wish. It will only go on for a couple years anyway.
TROILUS: I know how long your years are.
ZEUS: What do you mean?
TROILUS: Your years have centuries in them.
ZEUS: So you know about that too.
TROILUS: Yes. I know about it. I’m asking for my wish now. Let the war end.

You’ll have to read the book (or the news) to see how it all works out.

Finally, I’ll admit that one of my favorite parts of Be Brave to Things is Katz’s acknowledgements, which end with his gratitude to Kevin Killian. “Kevin knew more about Spicer and his work than anyone,” Katz writes, “and he put that knowledge at my disposal with the affectionate generosity for which he is legendary.” Returning to that interview with Joseph Bradshaw, Killian once said about Poet Be Like God, “Maybe I gave the world a Spicer more haunted than he had to be, a man more compromised than another biographer would have painted him. But that’s my New Narrative training where, we were taught, ‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend, then the fact, then the legend’ ad infinitum, so that the true and the false become a scrawl of intertangled interpellations calling each other out like faults.” With Be Brave to Things, Katz has done precisely that.

***

P.S. After completing the first draft of this review, I got word that Lew Ellingham had died. Lew and I met only a handful of times, but his reputation as the man who did the groundwork on the Spicer biography preceded him. Kevin spoke so highly of Lew and gave him credit for running around with a tape recorder to talk to those who knew Spicer back in the day, an oral history project of the North Beach scene that culminated in the 1,000-page manuscript that Kevin transformed into Poet Be Like God. As with so many other good things, Kevin and Lew met in Robert Glück’s workshops at Small Press Traffic, where Kevin fell into an enamored apprenticeship, and the rest is history. That is, it’s still unfolding even though they are both gone now.

Somewhere, Kevin took a photo of me with Lew at one of his readings at Alley Cat Books in San Francisco. I don’t have a copy, and, to my knowledge, I don’t have any photos of myself with Kevin either. It’s strange having hundreds of photos Kevin took of me for his Tagged project saved across a couple of thumb drives, but no picture of the two of us together. So many missed opportunities! Like visiting Spicer’s tomb with Kevin, after discovering that his remains had been put to rest beneath the colored glass of Cypress Lawn Memorial Park in Colma.

Dodie Bellamy describes the magic of those visits in “Chase Scene,” a huge letter written to Kevin following his death in 2019 and collected in her new essay collection, Bee Reaved (2021). “You took poet after poet—local or visiting—there. I went only once. Spicer’s niche is too high to reach, so you wheeled a ladder in front of it, and poets would climb up and read his poems to him. … David Kuhnlein, whom you photographed naked in the mausoleum, wrote, ‘Kevin then asked me to coax Spicer back from the dead by offering him sex in exchange for a new poem.’ I wonder if your tours really did awaken something in Spicer. I imagine him alone in the darkness all those years, waiting for exactly what you brought him.” Yes, Fate—Kevin Killian—has persevered.

There’s something about an uncollected poems, about Be Brave to Things, that makes me think of missed chances. Missed connections—poems retrieved, plays revived—are returned to the realm of possibility, spectral as that possibility might be. Over the decades, so many have dedicated their labors to raise Spicer’s ghosts, including the recently departed Lew. With me, he was charming and generous those few times we met, and scrolling back through my emails, I see this poem he wrote to me (with me?), which begins with some lines from an old poem of mine:

tell me to listen to the moon
my pale heart
 
what a father we might make
 
                         it’s after Xmas I reassess
                               all that’s traditional
                                             or just old
                                        in my life like
                a father dead these fifty years,
                        more really, little known
 
                                                        […]
 
                          to see a father in a lover
                           where a choice is made
                              rather than the ghost
                                  who hovers, covers
                             like the moon and sun
                                         a winter flower
                            a shadow of some color
                                                      or not