Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present

by Unknown

  (2000)

  TERENCE WINCH (1945–)

  Shoot the Horse

  They wanted my brother-in-law to shoot the horse. They said, “The horse must die.” My brother-in-law liked horses and sure didn’t want to shoot one. But what could he do? The people who said “The horse must die” were rich and powerful. They owned many things—the horse for one. What they said went. If they said to you “Go fuck yourself,” you did. If they said “Beat it,” you beat it. If they said “Eat shit,” you had to eat shit. You had to do what they told you. They said to him, “The horse must die. Shoot the horse.” So my brother-in-law got his gun.

  Once I was in the woods with my brother-in-law. It was in the middle of winter and we both wore snow-shoes. We came to a stream deep in the woods and he told me that he had to go check something and that I should wait for him. I said okay. He left and I waited about an hour and a half for him to come back. I was afraid to move since I figured that I’d get lost. I was sure that I would be attacked by bats, snakes, bears, whatever might live in the woods. But finally he came back before anything had a chance to attack me. Another time he gave me a rifle to carry in case we might meet up with any bobcats. There was a bounty on bobcats at that time which meant that if you shot one, you could collect some money.

  But he sure didn’t want to shoot the horse. He just had to shoot it because they told him to. So he got his gun and walked over to the stable. An Oriental gentleman took care of the horse. My brother-in-law walked right up to the Oriental gentleman and said, “I come to shoot this horse.” The Oriental gentleman asked, “Why?” My brother-in-law said, “Because they told me to.” So the Oriental gentleman brought the horse out of the stable for my brother-in-law to shoot.

  It was a real nice day, the day my brother-in-law shot the horse. The sun was shining and the green mountains looked very pretty. The horse was quite handsome and popular. The Oriental gentleman started to cry. The horse looked at my brother-in-law. But my brother-in-law looked right back at him. He said to the horse, “I come to shoot you dead,” and he lifted his gun, took aim, and shot the horse in the neck.

  But the horse took off, heading for the woods. Blood was spouting from his neck. My brother-in-law took off after him. Soon they were in the woods and the blood from the horse’s neck was gushing out all over the trees. My brother-in-law shot the horse in the ass and the horse started to bleed from the ass too. But he kept running with my brother-in-law chasing him. My brother-in-law kept after him, but he was getting tired. He didn’t know how the horse could have so much blood inside him. He got very angry at the horse. He yelled to the horse, “I’ll kill you, you sorry son of a bitch” and “I’ll blow your stupid fucking head off, you sorry son of a bitch.” The ordeal was very frustrating for my brother-in-law.

  My brother-in-law was covered with horse blood. He had been chasing the horse for about twenty minutes, but the horse kept going. It seemed like there was rich red horse blood splattered all over the woods. My brother-in-law knew that he wouldn’t be able to chase the horse much longer. The horse wasn’t going too fast, but he just never stopped long enough for my brother-in-law to get a good shot off into his brain.

  Finally, my brother-in-law collapsed and the horse kept going. He lay on the ground for a minute, soaked with warm horse blood, and when he looked up again, there was no sign of the horse, except for the trail of horse blood. My brother-in-law got up and said, “You fucking sorry son of a bitch.” What would he tell the people who had said to him “The horse must die”?

  My brother-in-law staggered back to the stable where he had first shot the horse in the neck. The Oriental gentleman was there and was still crying. When he saw how my brother-in-law was drenched in blood, he became terribly frightened.

  My brother-in-law was so angry and frustrated that he shot the Oriental gentleman in the face. As he shot him, he said, “You sorry son of a bitch.” The Oriental gentleman’s hands flung up to his face when he got shot, but there was nothing there but bloody mush and he was dead already anyway.

  The people who told him to “shoot the horse” were very understanding when my brother-in-law explained what had happened. “Those things happen,” they said.

  (1975)

  B.J. ATWOOD-FUKUDA (1946–)

  The Wreck of the Platonic

  The guy at the next table reminded her of her first serious boyfriend, but even as the word serious surfaced to the chattery part of her brain that was already watching someone hear her tell the story long since gone barnacle-encrusted as myth, already hearing her own voice run it out like Morse code on the quiet of a moonless, star-splattered sky, she realized as if pronouncing it for the very first time what a euphemism serious was, I mean it might have served some purpose in the early sixties when anyone would have understood that it meant the first boy she’d fucked, not loved, since in those days girls rarely fucked their first loves, assuming that girls back then loved for the first time at thirteen or fourteen the way they do now only more intensely, if anything, since girls back then not only didn’t assume that the relationship, which they didn’t call it, if any, would be consummated but, if they’d been raised in those days of the double standard to be, well, nice, they were mostly scared silly of the very idea notwithstanding the depth of their craving, the intensity of their fascination with the throbbing flesh for which it, mere ‘very idea’ in the starch voices of a million middle-class white moms, was but a limp stand-in, a shriveled shill, a most unreasonable, wimpy facsimile thereof. So they built the ship Platonic to warn us not to screw; what it had to do with Plato, we didn’t have a clue. Poor Plato, alas, lamented the incapacity of chairs to approach the ideal of chairness; no chair, however hard it might try, could ever achieve in his eyes the beauty of that naked, unmediated state. Poor Plato, obsessed with chairs. No wonder she and her girlfriends had wondered why abstinence was called Platonic or, more precisely, why it meant not-fucking, since if they’d run into the word at all it would have been somebody’s uncle in AA, and who ever talked about that back then; and finally, when they got to philosophy in school, how the hell Platonic got conjured from Plato, a man who had once lived and breathed and jerked himself off, they supposed, against the backs of chairs in various states of imperfection—rocky, rickety, rocking—the doctor in the deep blue sea only knew. Poor Plato, lured off his true and proper course, fetched up on a floating slagheap of sophistry, hoisted on a pinnacle of pieties arch and brittle as ice. O they built the ship Platonic to warn us not to screw, and they thought we’d get on board and enjoy the frigid view. Were they wrong. Young girls and boys saw right through their parents’ ploys, husbands and wives had to reassess their lives. Was it sad? no doubt, o so sad, she thought as she eyed the guy at the next table over and watched that clone of her first serious boyfriend lean back in his chair so it squealed and moaned under his weight, so its legs thrust up to reveal at once the fragility and force of the attachment, the dazzling impermanence of the greater whole—a form which surpassed, in its corporeal perfection, any ideal to which it might have sought or been forbidden to aspire. O spire, o pinnacle of pieties erupting on the sweet breath of night, plunging into the dark, fragrant, teeming, blooming sea. How they lied, yee-hah! how we laughed and cried, how they sighed when that great ship went down.

  (1999)

  ANDREI CODRESCU (1946–)

  De Natura Rerum

  I sell myths not poems. With each poem goes a little myth. This myth is not in the poem. It’s in my mind. And when the editors of magazines ask me for poems I make them pay for my work by passing along these little myths which I make up. These myths appear at the end of the magazine under the heading ABOUT CONTRIBUTORS or above my poems in italics. Very soon there are as many myths as there are poems and ultimately this is good because each poem does, this way, bring another poet into the world. With this secret method of defying birth controls I populate the world with poets.

  (1973)

  Secret Training

  Th
e busdriver of the Mission bus at 1 A.M. is a statistician of chance, he computes his run of luck by mentally guessing how many people will get on his bus at each stop. Every time he guesses wrong he chalks it up to the ODDS column; when he guesses right he puts it in EVENS. This way he learns the ratio of occurrence of luck in his guesses and cunningly uses his knowledge to win his way through Las Vegas and Monte Carlo to owning a giant fleet of taxicabs in which he introduces a strange sort of meter that charges passengers not according to miles travelled but to random guesses based on the character, wealth and astrological signs of the clientele; these meters are so accurately timed to the owner’s ratio of luck that soon he is rich enough to own an airline but this airline is soon outlawed and the owner put in jail because half the planes crash for inexplicable reasons through sudden streaks of disorder in his relations to chance.

  (1973)

  Power

  Power is an inferiority complex wound up like a clock by an inability to relax. At the height of my power I have to be taken to a power source in the woods where I am recharged. This power source is not actually in the woods: it’s in my mother. It hums quietly in her heart like an atomic plant and the place to plug in is her eyes.

  (1973)

  RAE ARMANTROUT (1947–)

  Bases

  Birds in flight switch places above and below a hypothetical bar—like a visual trill—though imitation in vulgar.

  The idea that each individual is a unique strain: weight and counter-weight in the organization of memory. So many forms representing, presumably, a few wishes.

  Chew the fat in order to spill the milk, in other words, from which the selfsame woman emerges.

  What the cool tomato cubes forming a rosette around this central olive have to do with love and happiness.

  Thrilled to elaborate some striking variant of what we imagine to be a general, if fabricated, condition.

  Two men on the street wax their teal-green, 50’s Mercury.

  She thinks the two are lovers, but you say you disagree. Now she’s angry either because you mimic, or because you merely mimic, ignorance of such things.

  She uses intercourse to symbolize persuasion.

  Old people never appear to have reserved judgment in the manner of a poised beauty.

  She dreamed the ill were allowed to wander at ease through the reconstructed, but vacant, Indian village.

  Her eyes scanning the near range with a feeble sense of their being like children sledding, though never having done that adds a campiness to the “Whoo-ee” of “I see.”

  You’re not crying because you can’t find the thing you made, but because she won’t help. She won’t because she’s comfortable, reading—but not really because now you’ve stuck your head behind her shoulder sobbing and pretending to gasp. She goes away to pick up your clothes, but also to see if she can find the thing you want. You tell her it looks like a crab. While she’s gone you find it underneath her chair. You insist, bitterly, that you knew where it was all along; you were just testing her ability to see. It’s like keeping her eye on a bouncing dot. She says either you’re lying now or you were lying before when you were sobbing for it and needed her help. Really she thinks you were lying both times, all along, but not exactly.

  Now the news is of polls which measure our reactions to duplicity.

  She puts her tongue to the small hole, imitating accuracy.

  (1988)

  Middle Men

  The story is told from the view-point of two young technicians, one fat and one thin, who must give their superior a moment by moment account of their attempts to monitor the subject. Suspense occurs, occasionally, when they must tell the superior that they’re having trouble keeping the listening devices within range. We sympathize with the hunted subject, but also with the clearly competent, frequently exasperated technicians, whose situation is, after all, much more like our own.

  (1999)

  Imaginary Places

  Reading, we are allowed to follow someone else’s train of thought as it starts off for an imaginary place. This train has been produced for us—or rather materialized and extended until it is almost nothing like the ephemeral realizations with which we’re familiar. To see words pulled one by one into existence is to intrude on a privacy of sorts. But we are familiar with the contract between spectator and performer. Now the text isn’t a train but an actress/model who takes off her school uniform piece by piece alone with the camera man. She’s a good girl playing at being bad, all the time knowing better. She invites us to join her in that knowledge. But this is getting us nowhere.

  (2002)

  MICHAEL BURKARD (1947–)

  A Conversation About Memory

  “Today I was hungry and I wanted to ask how I appeared to someone else.” The moon also starves in the illusion of the raft. “The trees are like old doors” but are they: for the cold horse the hair is with fire and, because the detail of the moon is blood, neither retrieves the flowers you remember from the coast, because that is easy. Can we agree shame is the lifting of the main purpose, I mean taking it out as if you were driving only to see the lights drift, as if you were alone: you do not even want to stop for the mines and yes, all that past is now conclusive as the darkness dripping with grass, because the house is too heavy, an escape, and you can only relax in the window. “Another person is breaking into the water” and if you could accompany them you could feel bad, an instrument for black stars. This is the third time you have tried to speak to you. In three coats, moving up the street to three houses, “the always burnt figure of the branches” ascending only as air, in the air of being farther from you than ever before: keeping parts of the road lit, interminable “parts” because there is no returning to their location. Someone has drowned, and if the hands are a poor construction it is the sea then, and the stars, interminable as parts, even, and yet a strange kind of wreckage. You have summarized this before, you thought the nets had repeated two distances. Each repeated the other. Kneel near a fire: “The hands release whatever they’ve been holding.” Enough, yet this is not the way night begins. Yet night dedicates this, as your death, as your going simply into another field.

  (1977)

  LYDIA DAVIS (1947–)

  The Thirteenth Woman

  In a town of twelve women there was a thirteenth. No one admitted she lived there, no mail came for her, no one spoke of her, no one asked after her, no one sold bread to her, no one bought anything from her, no one returned her glance, no one knocked on her door; the rain did not fall on her, the sun never shone on her, the day never dawned on her, the night never fell for her; for her the weeks did not pass, the years did not roll by; her house was unnumbered, her garden untended, her path not trod upon, her bed not slept in, her food not eaten, her clothes not worn; and yet in spite of all this she continued to live in the town without resenting what it did to her.

  (1976)

  In the Garment District

  A man has been making deliveries in the garment district for years now: every morning he takes the same garments on a moving rack through the streets to a shop and every evening takes them back again to the warehouse. This happens because there is a dispute between the shop and the warehouse which cannot be settled: the shop denies it ever ordered the clothes, which are badly made and of cheap material and by now years out of style; while the warehouse will not take responsibility because the clothes are paid for and of no use to the wholesalers. To the man all this is nothing. They are not his clothes, he gets paid for this work, and anyway he intends to leave the company soon, though the right moment has not yet come.

  (1992)

  Agreement

  First she walked out, and then while she was out he walked out. No, before she walked out, he walked out on her, not long after he came home, because of something she said. He did not say how long he would be gone or where he was going, because he was angry. He did not say anything except “That’s it.” Then, while he was out, she walked out on him and went do
wn the road with the children. Then, while she was out, he came back, and when she did not return and it grew dark, he went out looking for her. She returned without seeing him, and after she had been back some time, she walked out again with the children to find him. Later, he said she had walked out on him, and she agreed that she had walked out on him, but said she had only walked out on him after he walked out on her. Then he agreed that he had walked out on her, but only after she said something she should not have said. He said she should agree that she should not have said what she said and that she had caused the evening’s harm. She agreed that she should not have said what she said, but then went on to say that the trouble between them had started before, and if she agreed she had caused the evening’s harm, he should agree he had caused what started the trouble before. But he would not agree to that, not yet anyway.

  (1997)

  AARON FOGEL (1947–)

  The Chessboard Is on Fire

  1

  The ant stood up on two legs looks like a chesspiece maybe a bishop.

  These wooden rings of different radii, stacked concentrically—make a chesspiece, which one not clear, because it’s on fire, unidentifiable, unmistakable. But you don’t know what we mean, we’re all gangsters without a gang, fantoccini.