A Second Train Song for Gary: Jack Spicer (1950-52)

When the trains come into strange cities
The citizens come out to meet the strangers.
I love you, Jack, he said
I love you, Jack, he said
At another station.
When passengers come in from strange cities
The citizens come out to help the strangers.
I love you too, I said
I love you too, I said
From another station.
The citizens are kind to passing strangers
And nourish them and kiss their lips in kindness.
I walk the unbelieving streets
I walk the unbelieving streets
In a strange city.
At night in cold new beds the welcomed strangers
Achieve in memory the city’s promise.
I wake in love with you
I wake in love with you
At last year’s station.
Then say goodbye to citizens and city
Admit this much—that they were kind to strangers.
I leave my love with you
I leave my love with you
In this strange city.

Jack Spicer (1925–1965) was one of the most distinctive voices of the San Francisco Renaissance, an avant-garde poet and linguist who resisted the idea that poetry was simply an expression of the self. He imagined the poet instead as a kind of radio receiver, picking up transmissions from an invisible world. He called this process dictation.

Living and writing in an era of profound hostility towards homosexuality, Spicer made his home in the queer artistic circles of San Francisco’s North Beach. His relationships were often complicated by fleeting encounters, unrequited affection and the difficulty of sustaining intimacy in a world that offered little room for it.

A Second Train Song for Gary was written between 1950 and 1952, the recipient being Spicer’s long-distance lover Gary Bottone.

There is something particularly moving about this poem’s succession of stations, strange cities and temporary beds. Love arrives, is welcomed, and becomes a memory almost before it can be held. The repeated declarations feel like an attempt to make something lasting out of encounters that are, by their nature, transient. Affection survives the journey, even when the lovers cannot remain together.

Spicer died aged forty in San Francisco General Hospital from acute alcohol poisoning. According to the often-recounted account, his final words to his friend and fellow poet Robin Blaser were: “My vocabulary did this to me.”

It is a devastating epitaph for a poet who spent his life listening for words from somewhere beyond himself. In this poem, however, it is not language alone that remains. It is the tenderness of what was said, the ache of departure, and the love left behind in a strange city.