Any fool can get into an ocean
But it takes a Goddess
To get out of one.
What’s true of oceans is true, of course,
Of labyrinths and poems. When you start swimming
Through riptide of rhythms and the metaphor’s seaweed
You need to be a good swimmer or a born Goddess
To get back out of them
Look at the sea otters bobbing wildly
Out in the middle of the poem
They look so eager and peaceful playing out there where the
water hardly moves
You might get out through all the waves and rocks
Into the middle of the poem to touch them
But when you’ve tried the blessed water long
Enough to want to start backward
That’s when the fun starts
Unless you’re a poet or an otter or something supernatural
You’ll drown, dear. You’ll drown
Any Greek can get you into a labyrinth
But it takes a hero to get out of one
What’s true of labyrinths is true of course
Of love and memory. When you start remembering.
Spicer, Jack. My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer. Ukraine, Wesleyan University Press, 2010.
Why I chose this poem
I ran across this in an email search, and I don't remember reading it or sending it, but I can clearly see why I would have. I have a thing for
And so, it's not lost on me that I was searching because I had gone into the labyrinth of a fractured family relationship. And there's something, too, about the metaphor of water. The first poem here, for example:
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.
Not sure if I'm just less cynical or what, but it makes me sad, the way the speaker pronounces to his dear, "Unless you’re a poet or an otter or something supernatural / You’ll drown, dear. You’ll drown . . . it takes a hero to get out of one." Perhaps that's just a little piece of why The Heroine's Journey was so important to me.