S. YARBERRY
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FIVE WORDS FOR WILLIAM BLAKE ON HIS 265TH BIRTHDAY
AFTER JACK SPICER
AFTER JACK SPICER
I SHALL GIVE YOU FIVE WORDS FOR YOUR BIRTHDAY!
A-Horse-Named-Slipper
Stolen from the beauty of all that
there is no etymology for
what will bring this language
together—it refracts, the language,
the sounds, broken bottles
slipped the mind of the dumpster.
Delicate foot, delicate hoof clops
down the city’s bright pavement.
Vortex
A name given to what we want
to get inside. Center (not
Centaur, but the middle of things). I
wrote down
sweet brush of chaos
because I love you! I wrote it
down, down, down in the
vortex. The vortex is always
the poem (here we are inside it).
Sorcerer
This word runs through the street—
empty, ablaze, and singing soft relations,
gold doors, flickers of light in the foyer.
Field-of-Clouds
Years ago [Cue: a memorable fancy:
inside an airplane [all I dream of now—
planes and the one I’m sleeping beside
with me, flying]! ] I saw the cloud
of not what it ommitted nor what it
meant. The cloud, its shape seemed
suddenly apprehensible, as in sensual,
a way of loving the world not knowing
why, how, yes, should.
Mirror-Secret-Red-Peony
A trope is nothing other than falling
in love with repetition! Buy
your girlfriend flowers that are
metaphorical—in the sense that stars
are always metaphorical [un-
purchaseable; henceforth! anti-
capitalist [?].] Look at yourself,
you’re 265 years old and still
breaking hearts, tenderly,
slowly, all those good ways—with words,
words, those secret mirrors.