Most poems try to hold the world still long enough to describe it. In "The Little Halfwit," Jack Spicer does something stranger: he says a word and watches it fail. The poem opens with a speaker who says "Afternoon" and finds that "it wasn't there." Afternoon, the poem tells us, "was another thing / Which had gone someplace." The word has been spoken, but the thing it names has wandered off.
That small failure is the poem's whole subject. The speaker tries again, "Afternoon", and then cuts himself off: "But this is useless, / This is untrue." A word that points at nothing is worse than silence. It is a falsehood, and Spicer gives that falsehood a physical weight: "Half a moon of lead." The image is odd and memorable. A moon is something luminous and round, and here only half of it exists, and that half is dead metal. The speaker holds the heavy half, the word; "The other / Will never get here." The missing half is the living thing the word was supposed to meet.
Language and reality, in other words, are a broken pair, and the poem stages their separation as a kind of loss. Here the imagery turns from abstraction to something almost like grief. "The other one was tiny / And ate pomegranates." It is a startling shift, because the lost afternoon suddenly becomes a small, vivid creature with an appetite. The pomegranate carries heavy associations, since it is the fruit of the Persephone story, a myth of someone taken away and only partly returned. Spicer never says so, and a careful reader should treat that connection as a suggestion rather than a certainty, but the fruit sits there in the poem, bright and strange, a detail too specific to be accidental. Against that small, hungry original stands its replacement: "This one is big and green and I'm not able / To grab her in my arms or dress her." The words are clumsy and enormous where the lost thing was delicate. The speaker's helplessness is almost parental. He cannot hold her or clothe her, and he asks, with real pain, "Isn't she ever coming? What was she?" By the end he has lost not just the afternoon but his memory of what it was.
Running through all this are the parenthetical stanzas about light, which behave like a second voice commenting from the sidelines. The light "shrugged its shoulders / Like a little girl." It "played at being a statue." Finally, "as a joke," it "Separated the little halfwit from his own shadow." The light is mischievous and indifferent, a child's trickster who does not care that anyone is hurt. Notice that the first parenthesis is never closed, so the light's shrug hangs open and unfinished. The poem's title now makes sense. The halfwit is the speaker, or the poet, or anyone who tries to speak: someone who has only half of what he needs, the word without the world, and who has lost even his shadow, the one thing that should follow him faithfully.
Formally, the poem refuses the comforts of rhyme. The lines are short and conversational, varying in length, with no regular meter, so that the voice feels like someone thinking aloud and correcting himself. The dashes of self-interruption ("But this is useless") and the plain, almost childlike vocabulary make the strangeness more unsettling, because the poem sounds simple while describing something that cannot be said simply.
What makes it significant is its honesty about its own medium. A poem is made of words, and this one admits, in the middle of being a poem, that words may be a weight rather than a bridge. Few poems risk undermining themselves so openly, and fewer do it with such tenderness, mourning an afternoon the way you might mourn a lost child.