In the white endlessness Snow, seaweed, and salt He lost his imagination.
The color white. He walks Upon a soundless carpet made Of pigeon feathers.
Without eyes or thumbs He suffers a dream not moving But the bones quiver.
In the white endlessness How pure and big a wound His imagination left.
Snow, seaweed, and salt. Now In the white endlessness.
Spicer's poem is named after another poet, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and it seems to picture a figure stranded in a world made entirely of white: snow, seaweed, salt. In the first stanza he loses his imagination, and everything after reads like the aftermath of that loss. The setting is blank and silent. He walks on a "soundless carpet" of pigeon feathers, soft but eerie, like a place where nothing can happen.
The third stanza is the strangest. Without eyes or thumbs, he can't see or grasp anything, and his dream doesn't move, yet "the bones quiver." The body keeps trembling even though everything else has gone still. Then the poem turns the loss into something almost beautiful: the imagination left "how pure and big a wound." The mood is hushed, bleak, and oddly reverent. By ending on the same landscape it began with, the poem traps us in that whiteness, as if there's no way out of the emptiness.