Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present

by Unknown

  (1986)

  Crocus Solus

  A sigh? No more: a yellow or white rupture of the cold silent winter ground, the exclamation of such effort. Yet unaccompanied by the echoing multitudes that hope surveys; one only, and whether an accident or an example, too important in its uniqueness to be considered important for its meaning. O, spring will come, and one time it will not, but what we are to know we will know from all the various emblems crying, out of the grass, vivace assai, and waving in the soft wind, ô Mort. One swallow of water makes no summer of earth. One drop of darkness is no sign of wine. One flower points to nothing but itself, a signboard bravely hung outside the signpainter’s. The crocus of all points, lying along the river, that speak for themselves is but one point of saffron or of snow. A sign? O, more . . .

  (1986)

  Not Something for Nothing

  What he had begun only lately to notice was this: that he had always noticed relatively little of what was going on inside of, and among, the things he encountered; and this led him to recall noticing always what he had already possessed himself of: shining objects of memory. So that when, for example, he passed by something growing, something that had or had not bloomed yet, he would have had to wander back into the bright mountain meadow all ringed about with high pines and where all the names grew, to pluck a flower of designation and bear it back, through the shadowy woods, to the spot of attention. And it was because he could notice so little that he was able to call attention to things so startlingly sometimes. His mind was always wandering. He could point the way home.

  (1986)

  HARRY MATHEWS (1930–)

  Three Entries from 20 Lines a Day

  A man and a woman marry. For their first meal at home she bakes a ham, preparing it as she always does, at the start slicing off both its ends before setting it in the pan. The ham is delicious, her husband delighted. “Why do you make it that way,” he later asks her, “slicing the ends off?” “I don’t know why,” she answers, “except that I learned to do that from my mother.” Curious, the husband asks his mother-in-law at their next meeting, “Why do you slice both ends off the ham when you make it in the delicious way you taught your daughter?” “I don’t know why,” she answers. “I learned how to make it from my mother.” The husband insists that he and his wife visit her grandmother, whom he again asks: “You bake ham in a wonderful way that has been adopted by your daughter and then by your granddaughter. Can you tell me why in this recipe one slices off the ends of the ham before cooking it?” “Don’t know why they do it,” the old lady replies, “but when I made it, the ham wouldn’t fit in the pan.”

  This fable, illustrating our inevitable ignorance about why things happen the way they do, was told to us on the first day of the More Time Course, which included many other goodies: how to avoid fatigue by sleeping less, how to manage disagreeable emotions by scheduling them, how to replace paying bills by making contributions to institutions one admires (such as Con Ed, restaurants, taxicabs).

  (New York, 4/20/83)

  In bright late-winter sunlight, your mail sits on a neighbor’s window-sill, leaning neatly stacked against the window. The child gets out of the car to fetch it. Back at the house, you take the envelopes and packages and open them eagerly, almost (but you are a grown-up and know better) feverishly. What will those sealed contents reveal? What changes small and great will they bring to your life? Questions both foolish and irresistible. As if something might change, as if the postman (now a briskly efficient young woman) might deliver to you the message, the ultimate message that you’ve been waiting all your life for, that would make your life clear and complete. Sometimes the ultimate message is in fact received. It reads, more or less: “Your ligament issues from a spa that is given various narcissisms at various timetables: lozenge, credulity, goggles. And not only your ligament (and that of others): the prodigy that generates mayday has the same orthography. You and the upkeep are one. Give up sugarbowls.” At such moments you realize, and you remember, that such messages have never been lacking, and that they are all the same, and that the problem (if that is the word) doesn’t involve receiving but deciphering what is received again and again, day after day, minute after minute.

  The letter that made you happiest recently (someone planned to devote an issue of his magazine to your work) was opened without such expectation, without expectation of any kind. You found it deposited in your mailbox unusually early on a gray morning in Paris, where your important mail is rarely sent, on your way out to breakfast, still numb from sleep.

  (Lans, 3/6/84)

  If you decided to decode the “ultimate message” of two days ago, you might find the task less forbidding than it at first seemed. Encoding and decoding mean substitution: as a first step, replace all words in the message that strike you as obscure with their most likely dictionary definitions. The message then would read: “Your connecting bond issues from a mineral spring that has attributed to it various [forms of] excessive love of yourself, according to the listings of various arrivals and departures: pleasantly flavored medication; gullibility; protective tinted spectacles. And not only your connecting bond (and that of others): the fearful event that generates [your] signals of distress manifests the same method of representing sounds by literal symbols. You are one with the maintenance [of things] in proper operation, condition, and repair. Give up your covered sweets.”—You already have been provided with more accessible meanings. The very process of discovering and transcribing started possibilities of interpretation flashing in your imagination: the “mineral spring” seemed to appear for the exact purpose of reflecting Narcissus . . . . Much, if not all, of the message can be read as an injunction to give up pleasurable escapes (cough drops, dark glasses, sugar) and to accept the conditions of existence. Those conditions frighten you, but they also give you your life. That the conditions include a mineral spring and that you are connected to the “proper operation” of what is outside you imply a link with the inorganic world that remains hard to grasp. Furthermore the “method of representing sounds by literal symbols,” common to what binds you to the world and to the frightening event, demands investigation.

  (Lans, 3/8/84)

  MARK STRAND (1934–)

  In the Privacy of the Home

  You want to get a good look at yourself. You stand before a mirror, you take off your jacket, unbutton your shirt, open your belt, unzip your fly. The outer clothing falls from you. You take off your shoes and socks, baring your feet. You remove your underwear. At a loss, you examine the mirror. There you are, you are not there.

  (1964)

  Success Story

  Had I known at the outset the climb would be slow, difficult, at times even tedious, I would have chosen to walk the length of one of the local valleys, resigning myself to limited views, low thoughts, and a life that inspired none of the loftier disenchantments.

  But how was I to know? The ground seemed level at first, and the walks were wide. Only gradually did I become aware of climbing; the going got rougher, I would be short of breath, pauses were frequent. Often I would have to retrace my steps until I found a more promising route.

  I continued through all seasons and can recall how hopeless my venture seemed during those long winter nights and how, during the Spring when my determination thawed, I would have to imagine the Winter again, the cold, the discomfort.

  If there were times I doubted arriving, I know now that my fears were groundless, for here I am, at the peak of my form, feeling the great blue waste of sky circle the the scaffold of my achievement. What more is there? I count myself among the blessed. My life is all downhill.

  (1964)

  From a Lost Diary

  I had not begun the great journey I was to undertake. I did not feel like it. At breakfast, I thought of writing to Goethe, but of course did not. I had not met him yet, so could not pretend to be on good terms with him. Would I sit for Raeburn? I turned it over a few times and chose not to. Why should I commit
my looks on a particular day to the casual glances of history? I stared a long time at the green fields to the west of the house, and watched with numb fascination the immobility of two spotted cows. Lunch was out of the question, and so was the letter to Wordsworth. I was sure he would not respond. Would I myself write a poem? I had never written one, but decided that nothing would be lost by postponing the experiment. There is so much not to do! Not to visit Blake or Crabb Robinson. Not to write Corot and tell him about the cows. Not to write Turner about my vision of the sun that like a red cry sank and smothered in rippling water until finally far away the water fell into the soundless chasms of an infinite night. What a relief! My mother, hunched over her needlework, urged me to write my sister to whom I had nothing to say. “In many instances it is better and kinder to write nothing than not to write,” said she, quoting someone or other. A day so much like the others, why do anything about it? Why even write this down, were it not for my going on record as not having lived. After all, who can believe what is not written down? That I have withdrawn from the abuses of time means little or nothing. I am a place, a place where things come together, then fly apart. Look at the fields disappearing, look at the distant hills, look at the night, the velvety, fragrant night, which has already come, though the sun continues to stand at my door.

  (1990)

  Chekhov: A Sestina

  Why him? He woke up and felt anxious. He was out of sorts, out of character. If only it would go away. Ivashin loved Nadya Vishnyevskaya and was afraid of his love. When the butler told him the old lady had just gone out, but that the young lady was at home, he fumbled in his fur coat and dresscoat pocket, found his card, and said: “Right.” But it was not right. Driving from his house in the morning to pay a visit, he thought he was compelled to it by the conventions of society which weighed heavily upon him. But now it was clear that he went to pay calls only because somewhere far away in the depths of his soul, as under a veil, there lay hidden a hope that he would see Nadya, his secret love. And he suddenly felt pitiful, sad, and not a little anxious. In his soul, it seemed to him, it was snowing, and everything was fading away. He was afraid to love Nadya, because he thought he was too old for her, his appearance unattractive, and did not believe that a young woman like her could love a man for his mind or spiritual character. Everything was dim, sharing, he felt, the same blank character. Still, there would rise at times in him something like hope, a glimpse of happiness, of things turning out all right. Then, just as quickly, it would pass away. And he would wonder what had come over him. Why should he, a retired councillor of state, educated, liberal-minded, a well-traveled man; why should he, in other words, be so anxious? Were there not other women with whom he could fall in love? Surely, it was always possible to fall in love. It was possible, moreover, to fall in love without acting out of character. There was absolutely no need for him to be anxious. To be in love, to have a young pretty wife and children of his own, was not a crime or a deception, but his right. Clearly, there was something wrong with him. He wished he were far away . . . But suddenly he hears from somewhere in the house the young officer’s spurs jingle and then die away. That instant marked the death of his timid love. And in its vanishing, he felt the seeds of a different sort of melancholy take root within him. Whatever happened now, whatever desolation might be his, it would build character. Yes, he thought, so it is only right. Yes, all is finished, and I’m glad, very glad, yes, and I’m not let down, no, nor am I in any way anxious. No, certainly not anxious. What he had to do now was to get away. But how could he make it look right? How could he have thought he was in love? How out of character! How very unlike him!

  (1990)

  MICHAEL BENEDIKT (1935–)

  The Doorway of Perception

  If it was one thing he knew—even standing outside in the yard—it was that the universal problem had to be solved, the Doorway of Perception opened, behind which, despite the extraordinary demands he often made of himself, he still felt trapped in the vestibule of mimicry. So, he knocked on the door. But no one opened it. He tried the knob, but it seemed to be stuck. (He thought he heard a tumbler start to click inside the lock—but then it stopped). He bent down and attempted to pick the lock using the keys from his own apartment door—but of course, that produced absolutely no result whatsoever. Impatiently, he arose, walked back across the yard, and threw all his weight against the door from fifteen feet away! . . . but for some reason, that didn’t work either. Again and again he tried to break through that damned door, running at it across the yard from still greater and greater distances, but time after time nothing happened—except that the last time he threw his weight against it, the entire building came crashing down around it! And still, the door stood. Slowly, he backed up a dozen yards to the furthermost limits of the yard, which was surrounded by a fence; and once again launched himself at the door—but this time he only succeeded in smashing his spinal column! Finally, from his brand new wheelchair, he tried nuclear dynamite. The earth fell down around the door; he realized that the sky was falling—he actually moved both Heaven and Earth! Just before they fell, he managed to peer at eye-level from his wheelchair through the keyhole. But all he saw back there was someone holding up a small hand mirror—the tiny, inexpensive kind they sell at dime stores; and, in the center of the mirror, directly opposite the keyhole and looking directly back at him, was an eye.

  (1976)

  RUSSELL EDSON (1935–)

  A Performance at Hog Theater

  There was once a hog theater where hogs performed as men, had men been hogs.

  One hog said, I will be a hog in a field which has found a mouse which is being eaten by the same hog which is in the field and which has found the mouse, which I am performing as my contribution to the performer’s art.

  Oh let’s just be hogs, cried an old hog.

  And so the hogs streamed out of the theater crying, only hogs, only hogs . . .

  (1973)

  The Pilot

  Up in a dirty window in a dark room is a star which an old man can see. He looks at it. He can see it. It is the star of the room; an electrical freckle that has fallen out of his head and gotten stuck in the dirt on the window.

  He thinks he can steer by that star. He thinks he can use the back of a chair as a ship’s wheel to pilot this room through the night.

  He says to himself, brave Captain, are you afraid?

  Yes, I am afraid; I am not so brave.

  Be brave, my Captain.

  And all night the old man steers his room through the dark . . .

  (1976)

  The Taxi

  One night in the dark I phone for a taxi. Immediately a taxi crashes through the wall; never mind that my room is on the third floor, or that the yellow driver is really a cluster of canaries arranged in the shape of a driver, who flutters apart, streaming from the windows of the taxi in yellow fountains . . .

  Realizing that I am in the midst of something splendid I reach for the phone and cancel the taxi: All the canaries flow back into the taxi and assemble themselves into a cluster shaped like a man. The taxi backs through the wall, and the wall repairs . . .

  But I cannot stop what is happening, I am already reaching for the phone to call a taxi, which is already beginning to crash through the wall with its yellow driver already beginning to flutter apart . . .

  (1977)

  The Rat’s Tight Schedule

  A man stumbled on some rat droppings.

  Hey, who put those there? That’s dangerous, he said.

  His wife said, those are pieces of a rat.

  Well, he’s coming apart, he’s all over the floor, said the husband.

  He can’t help it; you don’t think he wants to drop pieces of himself all over the floor, do you? said the wife.

  But I could have flipped and fallen through the floor, said the husband.

  Well, he’s been thinking of turning into a marsupial, so try to have a little patience; I’m sure if you were thinking of tu
rning into a marsupial he’d be patient with you. But, on the other hand, don’t embarrass him if he decides to remain placental, he’s on a very tight schedule, said the wife.

  A marsupial? A wonderful choice! cried the husband . . .

  (1985)

  The Canoeing Trip

  I had planned a canoeing trip. But then, after some considerable thought, I thought I’d rather go canoeing on an ocean liner. They have more facilities than simple canoes.

  But then I saw that an ocean liner would not fit the stream I had planned for my canoeing trip.

  And so, after considerable thought, I decided not to think again, but simply to exist.

  But even that becomes tiresome.

  So I began to think again.

  But then, after some considerable thought, I decided not to think again . . .

  (1997)

  The New Father

  A young woman puts on her father’s clothes and says to her mother, I’m your new husband.

  Just you wait till your father gets home, scolds the mother.

  He’s already home, says the young woman.