Anthony Robinson

On the Death of Jack Spicer

My vocabulary did this to me--
according to Norton, the dying words
of a poet given to drink. Who cares
if they aren’t true? Your love will let you go on.
All this while pouring two more fingers
of Scotch into a cracked juice glass. Held here
between amber and ice, my peculiar
obsession unfolds. Language is an odd story,
an old story whose trail is found among
the little words. What language has a word
for we, meaning not you and I, but me
and them, not you? It could be handy
when dividing treasure, or when speaking
to your ex about your current. And why,
when talking to God, did our English forebears
use the informal thou? If I had been
an English peasant startled at seeing
four bears emerge from a dark, deep wood, would
I address them as you or y’all? Do bears
demand formality? If they were Latin
bears, maybe vos, in a trembling voice.
You can’t say thou to the king, or a group
of Italian ursine peasant-threateners
but God doesn’t mind. He’s cool like that.
Now it’s simply you and me unless you live
in the South or in certain Mid-Atlantic
regions where locals address clumps of trees
as youse. Spanish su means his, hers or its.
My grandmother often gets the English
wrong, calling men she. Hell--that’s what she calls
everyone. One pronoun. In Medieval
romances, maidens and saints often lay
under trees, where Hansel and Gretel fell
asleep. He and she. Yawning, I begin
to understand how this could kill a man.

Anthony Robinson is a full-time career student and Oregon native who misses Southern California. A long time ago, he knew something about gravity and electromagnetic fields. He forgot. His recent work appears on The Alsop Review and in the current issue of Lynx.