from IMAGINARY ESSAYS (on Jack Spicers Billy The Kid)

II. Trying to tie it down hands slowly crossing two ends of a rope, one end pushed through into the gap just made in order to create a knot. But as both ends are pulled further & further away, in opposite directions from each other & the center, the knot disappears. Two hands left holding a line. In all that distance who could recognize his face. * To question the pleasure of heroes, the pleasure we take from them isolated across traverse-less gaps, trying to turn toward them facing. In the final scene of the movie, Billy is holding the flute that once belonged to his friend who he shoved out of a hide-out house into gunfire. In the final scene, Pat Garrett seemingly mistakes this flute for a gun. In Spicers Billy The Kid, one of the accompanying illustrations by Jess Collins features Billy drunk or dying in the arms of the Lady of Guadalupe with a flute in his left hand Pan-like, his hair looking less like hair than like leaves. In the winter of 1531, the Lady of Guadalupe appeared to Juan Diego speaking in the native tongue. Her appearance occurs a decade after the Spanish conquest of Mexico, which included the destruction of the temple of Tonantzin, the mother-goddess. Juan Diego was told by the Archbishop to ask her for something miraculous, a sign to prove her identity. (Quien es? Quien es?) Directed to a barren hill in winter & finding non-native roses growing there, Juan Diego fills his cloak. Appearing again before the archbishop, he opens his cloak & the flowers fall to the floor the image of the Lady on the cloak where it wasnt there before. Juan Diego becoming a poet & a saint. In Spicers poem, Lady of Guadalupe who is the lover / Of many first appears in section VII, aligned with a barren landscape filled with grasshoppers. This section of the poem sounds like a prayer, but who it is thats praying to her is unclear. In the next section, Our Lady Stands as a kind of dancing partner for the memory. Will you dance, Our Lady, Dead and unexpected?

Billy wants you to dance Billy Will shoot the heels off your shoes if you dont dance Billy Being dead also wants Fun.1 If it was Billy (or the speaker) praying to her, he then also betrays her. For fun. Back where poetry is Our Lady captivating & captivated, The Lady of Guadalupe as an image that binds together the native & that which replaced the native. Our Lady is a shadow of an image of an image of at least two histories. From the future looking backward, making more or less of the past the gap between MORE | LESS is what the real falls into, where it stays hidden the poem. Collage a binding together Of the real Which flat colors Tell us what heroes really come by. No, it is not a collage. Hell flowers Fall from the hands of heroes fall from all of our hands flat As if we were not ever able quite to include them. Hell flowers is a concept of transformation whereby the misery and toil of the musician results in the pleasure of the listener. The time hasnt yet come when we are that sure, that Love asks its bare question & lives. With the loss an answer always is.

Emphasis added

III. Let us fake out a frontier a poem somebody could hide in with a sheriffs posse after him A frontier a poem. A cartography of American History in the head-&-mouth-space of the poet & future readers of the poem. A correspondence. Through the left eye the words dancing as bullets. A frontier that is a part of the country that faces & forms a border to the other. How would real & fake as landscapes as poems as faces as histories be mapped? Immediately, the poems construction as a fake frontier is for losing somebody. The location of the words along this line widen the reading so that it is possible to see another performance in the line at the same time to fake out the frontier as an opponent. A deliberate misleading to fool/make a fool of. A frontier. To plunder, wound, kill (as a means of concealment). Harming as a means of hiding, creating a space where Billy The Kid can hide when he shoots people. A shelter of open sky for attracting the arrival of somebody in order to lose somebody, something, in this process. (Quien es? Quien es?) Fake or a fake out, artificial or authentic that loss is always for real. An ever-widening hole in the ground of the poem as if for a coffin on either side a land so full of false clues that it appears there is nothing but false clues to grasp. But even the false (the fake), shined up properly for display in some New York museum, you are forbidden to touch. Moultrie: (to Billy) What is it? Whats wrong? You all right? Youre not like the books! You dont wear silver studs! You dont stand up to glory! Youre not him! (crying) Youre not him! Youre not him! Exposed to the weathers of a frontier, distinctions between creator & creation erode the moving ground of who feels more let down. In the movie The Left-Handed Gun, Moultrie is a writer an apostle, a Mary Magdelene, & a Judas in one. *