Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present
Page 14
(1988)
JAMES TATE (1943–)
The Second Greatest Story Ever Told
Billy tried several times to wave his hand through some solid object, certain it would give, would prove to be no more than a flimsy projection. And when he lost in this game of confidence, he laughed uproariously, as though to say: I knew it!
He was well into his fourth quart of vodka. He had been drinking for three days. There was definitely something peaceful about it. Clean, neat, clear. The ice-machine couldn’t keep up. To hell with it.
He had stopped staggering and was no longer tired. He felt as though he were watching himself on the tube, the skeleton of the story shown through like a timeless Late Movie. The humanity of it overwhelmed him! How he wished to throw his lot in with the pack, a headlong sacrifice! He had thought until now that he was somehow on a stalk, he was the favored jester’s tool, comic and frightening, but still the only one of its kind.
He could still call Roberta; she had given him a second chance before. She seemed to see beyond his fluctuations, his flips and twitches. She knew him before he was born. She had been there all along.
Of course the call wouldn’t do much good if she knew he was drunk. But he wasn’t, not now. Now he saw how they served interlocking fates. She would come back, as always. She would forgive him. They could make it work. They had always said that.
Billy balanced himself against the wall and the table as he made his way toward the kitchen phone. He grabbed for the phone. He lunged and stabbed at it. It was empty air in his hand.
“Not this time, Billy,” her voice said.
Billy stared at the evasive phone. His legs crumbled beneath him until he lay like an unpropped dummy against the counter. There’s got to be more than this, he slobbered. Now he was drooling all over himself, imitating a bum he had once stumbled over in the Bowery. And then he laughed, remembering the sign the bum had tied around his neck: The Second Greatest Story Ever Told, and in pencil below: 5¢. The bum’s face was pocked with repulsive sores, mange or leprosy. Now Roberta’s face swam up through the bum’s. Billy crawled toward the twin image which shimmered before him ’twixt its double-identity like some cheap modern religious relic. “Come back!” he cried. “I need you!”
(1974)
Same Tits
It was one of those days. I was walking down the St. and this poster glassed in a theater billboard caught my eye. A really gorgeous set of tits. It was noon, hot as hell outside. So I said what the hell, paid my $2.50 and went in. Got a seat all by myself right in the middle. The curtain opens: there’s the same poster by itself in the middle of the stage. I sat there sweating. Finally decided to get the hell out of there. It was still noon, hot as hell outside.
(1976)
The List of Famous Hats
Napoleon’s hat is an obvious choice I guess to list as a famous hat, but that’s not the hat I have in mind. That was his hat for show. I am thinking of his private bathing cap, which in all honesty wasn’t much different than the one any jerk might buy at a corner drugstore now, except for two minor eccentricities. The first one isn’t even funny: Simply it was a white rubber bathing cap, but too small. Napoleon led such a hectic life ever since his childhood, even farther back than that, that he never had a chance to buy a new bathing cap and still as a grown-up—well, he didn’t really grow that much, but his head did: He was a pinhead at birth, and he used, until his death really, the same little tiny bathing cap that he was born in, and this meant that later it was very painful to him and gave him many headaches, as if he needed more. So, he had to vaseline his skull like crazy to even get the thing on. The second eccentricity was that it was a tricorn bathing cap. Scholars like to make a lot out of this, and it would be easy to do. My theory is simple-minded to be sure: that beneath his public head there was another head and it was a pyramid or something.
(1986)
Distance from Loved Ones
After her husband died, Zita decided to get the face-lift she had always wanted. Half-way through the operation her blood pressure started to drop, and they had to stop. When Zita tried to fasten her seat-belt for her sad drive home, she threw-out her shoulder. Back at the hospital the doctor examined her and found cancer run rampant throughout her shoulder and arm and elsewhere. Radiation followed. And, now, Zita just sits there in her beauty parlor, bald, crying and crying.
My mother tells me all this on the phone, and I say: Mother, who is Zita?
And my mother says, I am Zita. All my life I have been Zita, bald and crying. And you, my son, who should have known me best, thought I was nothing but your mother.
But, Mother, I say, I am dying . . .
(1989)
Rapture
“If you sit here a long time and are real quiet, you just might get to see one of those blue antelope,” I said to Cora. “I’d do anything to see a blue antelope,” she said. “I’d take off all my clothes and lie completely still in the grass all day.” “That’s a good idea,” I said, “taking off the clothes, I mean, it’s more natural.” I’d met Cora in the library the night before and had told her about the blue antelope, so we’d made a date to try and see them. We lay naked next to one another for hours. It is a beautiful, sunny day with a breeze that tickled. Finally, Cora whispered into my ear, “My god, I see them. They’re so delicate, so graceful. They’re like angels, cornflower angels.” I looked at Cora. She was disappearing. She was becoming one of them.
(2000)
Bernie at the Pay Phone
I came out of the post office and there was Bernie Stapleton talking on a pay phone. Bernie had been hiding from me for seven years. I had loaned him a thousand dollars for an emergency and I never heard from him again. He wasn’t sure if I had recognized him, so he turned his back to me and hung his head down. Bernie didn’t know what it was to earn a living. He just moved from one scam to another, narrowly evading the law. But I had always had a soft spot in my heart for Bernie. I waited at a certain distance for him to get off the phone. I knew he was sweating blood. “Bernie,” I said, “where have you been? I’ve missed you.” He was massively uncomfortable. “I’ve been away. I’ve been running an investment firm in the Bahamas. Yeah, I’ve missed you too. How’ve you been?” “Well, to tell you the truth, I’m kind of down on my luck,” I said, which was a lie. “Maybe I could help you out, Simon. If you could come up with, say, a couple hundred bucks, I could turn it into something substantial real fast,” he said. Bernie never changed. Everything around us was changing so fast I couldn’t keep up, and there was Bernie at the pay phone making nickel and dime deals the way he’s always done. “I think I could come up with that much,” I said. “Then meet me here tomorrow at three. A little favor for an old friend, that’s the least I can do.” Bernie was standing tall now. He really believed he was an investment banker in the Bahamas, and not some scuzzy little rat holed up in Shutesbury without a pot to piss in. I admired that to no end. “Thanks, Bernie, I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.
(2001)
PAUL VIOLI (1944–)
Triptych
MORNING
6:30
(2)
Sunrise
(4)
Knowledge
(5)
Comparative Geography
(13)
Images and Things
(71)
Listen and Learn
7:00
(2)
News
(4)
News
(5)
WIDE WORLD
(8)
Public Affairs
7:30
(4)
Young Africans
(9)
Elsie Aquacade
(10)
The Young and the Restless
(13)
Religious Humoresque
(71)
Espionage
8:00
(2)
Asian Dimension
(5)
To Be Announced
(6)
Vanishing Point. A Sentinel in Swamplight; snow falling on black mud.
(10)
WEATHER. Flood footage, birds hop from branch to branch as the water rises higher and higher.
8:30
(8)
PERIPLUM
(9)
Mr. Itchy Starlight
(11)
DUENDE. He drives into a tree, he listens to the apples bounce off the hood of his car.
8:45
(9)
WEATHER. Thunderclaps, the clouds stampede.
(10)
SUBMISSION
9:00
(2)
Bugs Bunny
(7)
Snorkeling with Captain Bravo
(8)
TALES. “Why all this fear and trembling?” said the Wizard to the Shrew. “Is life all you know?”
9:30
(80)
Violence in Blue
(4)
Lisping Marauder
(71)
El Reporter
10:00
(7)
SERMON. What part of paradise is made of memory.
(9)
SCIENCE. A hammock rope is tied around a tree; as the trunk grows the bark swallows the rope and leaves an interesting scar.
10:30
(13)
MODERN EXPLORATION. The space a seemingly mindless, rush hour crowd leaves around a raving idiot.
(71)
BLINDSPOT
11:00
(2)
FANFARE. Blood on a concrete piano.
(4)
LOVELORN. Figure on a mountain-top digging up seashells.
(5)
Dragonquest
(7)
Elizabethan and Nova Scotian Music (with Charles North).
11:30
(9)
FEATURE. Telling fortunes by burning seaweed.
(13)
MUTINY. Fog drifts up to the house and crashes through the windows. Elephants bark in the distance.
(71)
FUTURAMA
AFTERNOON
12:00
(4)
News
(7)
News and weather. The wind hunting silence.
(8)
INQUISITION
12:30
(2)
A CHILLING TALE. A man with long blonde hair hands a threatening note to a teller with long blonde hair.
(13)
MODERN EXPLORATION. A deer trying to climb a ladder.
(71)
NECROPOLIS
(6)
INTERLUDE. Poisoned rats rot in the walls. You vacuum large black flies off the screens.
1:00
(5)
WHITE STRAWBERRIES
(7)
SNORT. No war buff, me.
(8)
Damaged Perspective
(9)
APPLIANCES AT AN EXPOSITION
(10)
Smut
1:30
(6)
TIME SPAN. “. . . and the spiders were singing in the wells.”
(71)
SCIENCE. An examination into the earwax of various races. Curious results.
(80)
WEATHER. Bleak snowlight, black helicopters to the rescue.
1:45
(4)
Dream Overload
(5)
A Stack of Bibles
2:00
(2)
VIGIL. 8 people on a train platform reading little books.
(4)
DISCOVERY. My elbow, the left one, the first time I’ve noticed it in years. Highlights: scars from unremembered wounds, new hair.
(5)
Polyphemus
(13)
LA HISTORIA. The men in Columbus’ crew are alotted over two liters of red wine per diem.
2:30
(6)
Mostly Prose. A bug flies through my eye. The crowd cheers.
(8)
CHERISHED FORMS
3:00
(7)
Conquistador
(13)
MODERN EXPLORATION. Spaces in the air where the wind waits disguised as silence.
4:00
(4)
JUMPING JESUS
(5)
Split Second
4:30
(6)
VANISHING POINT. And I sink through the chilly rain and leafless trees, past the colorful clothes left out on the line.
(8)
SPORTS AND WEATHER. Click. clunk. people bowling in the fog.
5:00
(2)
HOMILY. A long lost color returns to earth in a fleet of clouds, ending millennia of heretofore inexplicable melancholia.
(9)
BITCH ON WHEELS
6:00
(2)
Hitleresque
(13)
ARCHAEOLOGY. Pillars strewn wowiezowie across the sea floor of a sunken palladium.
(71)
RALPH WONDERFUL
(80)
Bucharest
7:00
(2)
News
(4)
Cow with a hair-lip: Moof.
(7)
NEWS AND WEATHER. Intermittent gales which drown the crickets, hundreds of acorns hit the roof and roll down the shingles.
EVENING
7:30
(13)
Brahms. Piano Concerto 2 in B flat major.
(45)
Pythagoras
8:00
(2)
UPDATE. The magicians explain why they failed.
(9)
SOUVENIR. A pubic hair, a perfect 6, on a bar of soap.
9:00
(7)
ART which was not interested in motion or time.
(9)
HOUR OF BLISS
(11)
STRANGE ENCOUNTER. “Neither darkness nor light,” said the Swamp Angel, “Neither darkness nor light can fill my eyes.”
10:00
(2)
CUISINE. Does torn bread really taste better than sliced bread?
(8)
Black Dimes.
10:30
(7)
MY BLOOD RAN COLD
(9)
The Young Elpenor. Besotted, he falls off roof, breaks neck, dies. The sea-dark wine.
(11)
KARMA. The live leafless branches and the dead tree against the sky, all grappling with the wind.
(71)
TIME AND TOLERANCE. An invisible nude enters the elevator. She’s chewing gum.
11:00
(2)
Moon out of focus
(5)
INTERMISSION. She leaves the table, her elbows are wet.
(6)
Cloud Armada
(8)
Hours bubbling in the everlasting wake of paradise.
(11)
CANYON. Another herd faceless and innumerable rushes by without showing Biff and Sally the way out.
11:30
(5)
WAVES wearing warbonnets charge a pair of plump identical twins.
(6)
FIFI FLEES—FOUL PLAY FEARED.
(8)
TYPICAL BAUDELAIRE: “. . . no point is sharper than that of the infinite.”