The Tunnel
Page 11
A marsupial? A wonderful choice! cried the husband …
With Sincerest Regrets
FOR CHARLES SIMIC
Like a monstrous snail a toilet slides into a living room on a track of wet, demanding to be loved.
It is impossible, and we tender our sincerest regrets. In the book of the heart there is no mention made of plumbing.
And though we have spent our intimacy many times with you, you belong to an unfortunate reference, which we would rather not embrace …
The toilet slides away on another track of wet …
The Thickening
A cook sleeps. On her lap a bowl of thickened material; a wooden spoon standing in it.
As she sleeps she absentmindedly pokes her head with the wooden spoon, and has flecks of the thickened material dotted in her hair. She sighs and snores …
Her mistress says, cook, you’re not doing work.
The cook nods and yawns.
But, cook, you have thickened material dotted in your hair.
Oh, ma’am, is you drowsy, too?
No no, I’m too excited — it’s stuff from your mixing bowl. What is that stuff that’s so wondrously thick in your mixing bowl?
I don’t know, ma’am, some kind of stuff what’s got thick …
It certainly looks thick, and you’ve got it dotted in your hair … Will you dot it in my hair? — I command it!
Then the master comes to see the thickened material, and wants it dotted in his hair; wonders what it would feel like dotted in groin hair …
No no, cries the mistress, you cannot show cook your penis.
Of course not, cries the master, what do you take me for, someone who shows his armpits to cooking women? Frankly, my secondary hair is none of her business … Mind your own business, cook, or I shall really have to take measures!
But the cook has fallen back asleep, and the thickened material has grown even thicker, as has the dark of the deepening dusk …
The Tunnel
I went tunneling into the earth …
My wife and I, going through an inventory of reasons, found nothing sufficient to the labor.
Still, she allowed, as I, that a direction once started, as if desire, and the desire to be desired, were mutually igniting, drew the traveler to its end without explainable reason …
Yet, does not the southern direction in extreme horizon look to the north, even as that of the north, finding the apex of its final arc, nod wearily south … ?
So I went tunneling into the earth, through darkness that penetration only makes darker, faithful to the idea of light, said always to be at the end of tunnels; perhaps not yet lit, but in the universe moving in rendezvous, thus to shimmer under the last shovelful of earth …
The Wheelbarrow
Cows they had, many, drifting like heavy clouds in the meadow.
But it was a wheelbarrow they didn’t have. They studied catalogs and prayed.
At last despairing the future they tied wheels to the front legs of a cow; two stout men lift the hind legs and wheel the cow about the farm.
The other cows, having never seen a wheelbarrow, turn and look. Then, turning again, they drift out like clouds into the meadow …
About the Author
Russell Edson is the author of many books of poems, prose and plays. He makes his home in Stamford, Connecticut.
Colophon
Text and cover designed by Steve Farkas. Composed by Professional Book Compositors using 11 point Varityper Medieval text type and News Gothic display type.
Printed and bound by Cushing-Malloy using 60# Glatfelter offset acid-free paper. Holliston Roxite B-Grade black cloth on casebound books with silver foil stamping on the spine.
TUNNEL:
selected poems
Russell Edson’s prose poems constitute some of the most original American art of this century. Like the boxes of Joseph Cornell, each is a miniature world, eerie in its logic, unsettling in its ruthless fun, dazzling in its invention. Much of Edson’s corpus has been out of print or difficult to find for some time now. In this new selection, we offer his own favorites from seven collections — The Very Thing That Happens (1964), What A Man Can See (1969), The Childhood of An Equestrian (1973), The Clam Theater (1973), The Intuitive Journey (1976), The Reason Why the Closet Man Is Never Sad (1977) and The Wounded Breakfast (1985)—restoring Edson to his large and international audience and introducing him to new readers who are committed to what is truly original and illuminating in language, imagination and poetry.
Oberlin College Press FIELD Editions Oberlin, Ohio
Cover image by Daro Montag. Book design by Steve Farkas.
ISBN 0-932440-65-7