Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present

by Unknown

  (May 1978)

  JAMES RICHARDSON (1950–)

  Vectors: Thirty-six Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays

  1.

  The road reaches every place, the short cut only one.

  2.

  Those who demand consideration for their sacrifices were making investments, not sacrifices.

  3.

  Despair says, I cannot lift that weight. Happiness says, I do not have to.

  4.

  Pessimists live in fear of their hope, optimists in fear of their fear.

  5.

  What you give to a thief is stolen.

  6.

  You’ve never said anything as stupid as what people thought you said.

  7.

  Who gives his heart away too easily must have a heart under his heart.

  8.

  I am saving good deeds to buy a great sin.

  9.

  If the couple could see themselves twenty years later, they might not recognize their love, but they would recognize their argument.

  10.

  Disillusionment is also an illusion.

  11.

  Our lives get complicated because complexity is so much simpler than simplicity.

  12.

  The wound hurts less than your desire to wound me

  13.

  The best way to know your faults is to notice which ones you accuse others of.

  14.

  No matter how much time I save, I have only now.

  15.

  Water deepens where it has to wait

  16.

  Ah, what can fill the heart? But then, what can’t?

  17.

  Opacity gives way. Transparency is the mystery.

  18.

  Shadows are harshest when there is only one lamp.

  19.

  All stones are broken stones.

  20.

  To paranoids and the elect, everything makes sense.

  21.

  The first abuse of power is not realizing that you have it.

  22.

  Each lock makes two prisons.

  23.

  It’s amazing that I sit at my job all day, and no one sees me clearly enough to say, “What is that boy doing behind a desk?”

  24.

  There are silences harder to take back than words.

  25.

  It’s easy to renounce the world till you see who picks up what you renounced.

  26.

  Writer: how books read each other.

  27.

  Of all the ways to avoid living, perfect discipline is the most admired.

  28.

  Happiness is not the only happiness.

  29.

  If you want to know how they could forget you, wait till you forget them.

  30.

  I’m hugely overpaid. Except compared to the people I work with.

  31.

  Who breaks the thread, the one who pulls, the one who holds on?

  32.

  All work is the avoidance of harder work.

  33.

  You who have proved how much like me you are: how could I trust you?

  34.

  Desire, make me poor again.

  35.

  Experience tends to immunize against experience, which is why the most experienced are not the wisest.

  36.

  All things in moderation, wisdom says. And says last Do not be too wise.

  (2001)

  JOHN YAU (1950–)

  Predella

  A blue woolen glove folded over like an old one dollar bill someone keeps hidden in their wallet just in case, a crumpled galosh, a rubber boot half-submerged in slush (remnants of a scene of unimagined violence?)

  A convoy of hats dispersed into the evening. The night was pulling its shade over the dirty window of the city. Half a face pushes out of the darkness, a boxing glove, and veers off down the narrowing corridor. An intersection of voices—how not to be snagged there the way a nylon stocking catches on a heel; a tear in the veneer. She thought about how she wiggled into her bra the way she settled in to a role; by moving around until she was comfortable. On the radio a song celebrating the joys of love in sincere doggerel.

  mounds of snow, complete with plateaus, threatening boulders, cliff faces, and the danger of avalanches

  Gray sky and gray underwear; everything was taking on the color of the city. As he bent down to pick up his crumpled dungarees from the floor, he was reminded of Claude Rains in The Invisible Man; the insane laughter echoing on the train platform; he had heard it again; the hatchet-faced man next to him in the diner reading the newspaper (he was, for some reason, wearing tan driving gloves); the story of a woman who killed and fed the family dog to her whining daughter and alcoholic husband. The headline was in bold type: MOM SERVES PUP STEW TO STEWED POP.

  furrows of snow; perfectly preserved tire tracks. It was as if a city had started growing in a farmer’s field where he had, just the morning before, been plowing. Everyone teetered; some fell; a new kind of gravity; life on the moon—

  Mrs. Garland was as thin as the blue and green handkerchief she often twisted between her hands while talking, continuing the story she had been telling for thirty-five years, or ever since her husband did not return home one evening. Her best friend, Mrs. Central, was also thin, though in her case it was a matter of bones more than flesh. Her skin did not have that quality of moonlight shining through paper windows; an image Mrs. Central often used to express her humble origins because, as she noted; “Since the Japanese live in paper houses—they must be extremely poor, though certainly neat and well mannered, as everyone knows.”

  so much so the days would have to begin elsewhere.

  (1980)

  Summer Rental

  Mrs. Trashbag was unable to come to any reasonable appraisal of what was standing in front of her temporary desk, just that the old man’s upswept hair bore a striking resemblance to the sleeves of his pleated, plaid coat. Who, her numbered underlings in the storeroom were whispering, could have possibly had the urge to rip all the plastic flowers out of their imported sleeping jackets? Was it the same culprit that last weekend stole a dozen infected parrots from the east wing of the castle’s library? These are the questions haunting the pockmarked halls of the old tavern down by the harbor. Later, morning’s leftover light is marked “dismal” and sent to the laboratory, where a team of agents carefully sifts through the spokes and glare.

  The crew has gathered near where the evening’s shadows thicken their fur in anticipation of the coming weather. Everyone else in the parking lot knows the movie is just an excuse to tell a bad story in livid colors. A woman caresses the knotholes of her wooden leg. Petey tries swallowing a woolen scarf. Meanwhile, the actors and actresses trying out for the lead roles believe they will be able to revive the remainders of their careers. Next to the parking lot, in a government funded home for semi-retired adolescents, the newly appointed director wonders who has been pissing in the umbrella stand. His secretary secretly covets contact with grated substances. In the cellar, a spotted paw defiles a garment made of coal.

  Thick with snakes and headbands, a stricken aroma undulates through a broken window. Once you are apprehended, you are returned to your room, and left with a plate of hot wax. This is what we in the institution fondly refer to as “living beyond your beans.”

  A cow imitates a car and crashes into a telephone pole. Grackles shriek and wolves whimper, but Byron Trashbag continues dozing, the brute hours of enforced labor wriggling through his muscles. He had had the worms before, but not like this. It is the month when penalties must be paid and extra facial hair removed from offending surfaces, the month when last year’s prisoners are lowered into the lower bunkers, and music hour consists of the same insurgent anthem played backwards.

  The ambitious assistant director heard himself announce to the seagulls still glued to the eaves of the burning roof: Once you’ve mutilated the night in your sleep,
there is no turning back.

  (2000)

  PETER JOHNSON (1951–)

  Pretty Happy!

  I have no siblings who’ve killed themselves, a few breakdowns here and there, my son sometimes talking back to me, but, in general, I’m pretty happy. And if the basement leaks, and fuses fart out when the coffee machine comes on, and if the pastor beats us up with the same old parables, and raccoons overturn the garbage cans and ham it up at 2 o’clock in the morning while some punk is cutting the wires on my car stereo, I can still say, I’m pretty happy.

  Pretty happy! Pretty happy! I whisper to my wife at midnight, waking to another night noise, reaching for the baseball bat I keep hidden under our bed.

  (1997)

  Tex-Mex

  “Everything in this world passes, but love will last forever.” If this is true, then where is my Gigi this morning? I am naked, half-embalmed, like a worm at the bottom of a brown bottle, a certain Black-eyed Susan curled around my leg, only the sound of my palomino weeping in the prairie grass. My battery is dead, my cactus has growing pains . . . We were searching for the Old Dutchman’s mine, our guide Buck a consummate rough rider in every kind of saddle. Joe the Bad and Jim the Ugly brought up the rear. “Call me Blue or Coyote,” I drawled, which made Gigi laugh. Or was it my Styrofoam pith helmet with the smiley-face decal on front? “We’ll be breaking virgin territory,” Buck grunted, but all I saw was a huge pyramid of cast-off microwave ovens. The day wore on, the sun dragging it westward like a withered foot. We shot a few elk and wild pigs, milked some rattlesnakes. At the hoedown at Apache Jack’s, we shared campfire stories. “I had a cheesy childhood,” I began, “one with many holes in it, and a heavy Thing, a Thing like the last tree left standing so you can build a house around it.” “When you’re done, Stretch,” Buck said, opening a large, brown bottle of mescal, “can you pass the beans?” What do I remember? The raw outline of a covered wagon branded on Buck’s forearm, his red hair bristling like porcupine quills, and then bushwhacked I was by a certain Black-eyed Susan, whose snoring now seems as cruel as hunger—the price to pay for going home with the wrong Gigi.

  (1998)

  MAXINE CHERNOFF (1952–)

  His Pastime

  A man held his breath. Unlike other men, who momentarily hold their breath, then gasp like small bags bursting, this man continued for days. He stopped working and gave up all nourishment. His face turned blue as a police uniform, then black. Even his shadow held its breath, motionless on the floor. A newspaper heard of this man, perched on his breath like a flagpole. They sent a reporter to cover the story. The man holding his breath served the reporter cookies and tea. In response to the reporter’s first question, the man politely exhaled. His breath, like a funnel, upturned all the things in the room. Unimpressed, the reporter lifted himself from under his chair and cracked teacup. The next day, on his way to work, the man who had held his breath read an editorial decrying swindlers, fanatics, and thrill-seekers.

  (1979)

  Vanity, Wisconsin

  Firemen wax their mustaches at an alarm; walls with mirrors are habitually saved. At the grocery women in line polish their shopping carts. Children too will learn that one buys meat the color of one’s hair, vegetables to complement the eyes. There is no crime in Vanity, Wisconsin. Shoplifters are too proud to admit a need. Punishment, the dismemberment of a favorite snapshot, has never been practiced in modern times. The old are of no use, and once a year at their “debut,” they’re asked to join their reflections in Lake Lablanc. Cheerfully they dive in, vanity teaching them not to float. A visitor is not embarrassed to sparkle here or stand on his hotel balcony, taking pictures of his pictures.

  (1979)

  The Inner Life

  for Tymoteusz Karpowicz

  After they decreed the end of lovemaking, we thought only of sleeping. Under our covers, each separate as a masthead at sea, we practiced dreaming. For it was the source of our only comfort, our only ties with emotions hazy as deceased uncles. Now we dreamed desperately. Those who couldn’t remember their dreams became insurance risks, showing up frequently in the papers as suicides or crime statistics. We were advised to look for mates who appeared to be affluent dreamers: heavy eyelids, an avid indifference to appearance, lights out early, very early in bedroom windows. You may be surprised we took mates at all, but we still grew lonely and wanted something to touch, even if it vanished when we opened our eyes. Those who excelled at dreaming were chosen to represent us. The forty hour week was replaced by the forty hour sleep. It was through our “sleep experience” that we earned advancement at work. New television series featured dream phantoms to replace late night horror shows, falling dreams instead of daily soap operas, and flying dreams for children. Who succumbed to the old feeling of helplessness when the paraphernalia for heroism was stored in every brain? Soon even our buildings were designed to resemble pillows and our young ones judged intelligent not by how soon they spoke the hackneyed “Mama” but by how accomplished they were at sleeping. Intelligence tests were given to determine what they could sleep through and our prodigies withstood avalanches easily as the cracking of porcelain thimbles. As with all major changes in civilization, the historians were at first puzzled. Many had retired to rest homes where they dreamed the rebuilding of the Roman Empire, the finding of a lost continent, the absence of Hitler. We had lost all sense of nationalism and all instinct for aggression. One man, one pillow became the slogan and even the most impoverished seemed satisfied. Some awake even part of the day suspected that the government had foreseen the outcome. Certain extremists refused to dream, claiming their unconscious was a tool in a scheme more diabolical than Manifest Destiny. But from the solid white building that stood impalpable as a dream image of a building, we heard no denial of the charges, just the assured snoring of men in serious pajamas.

  (1979)

  RITA DOVE (1952–)

  Kentucky, 1833

  It is Sunday, day of roughhousing. We are let out in the woods. The young boys wrestle and butt their heads together like sheep—a circle forms; claps and shouts fill the air. The women, brown and glossy, gather round the banjo player, or simply lie in the sun, legs and aprons folded. The weather’s an odd monkey—any other day he’s on our backs, his cotton eye everywhere; today the light sifts down like the finest cornmeal, coating our hands and arms with a dust. God’s dust, old woman Acker says. She’s the only one who could read to us from the Bible, before Massa forbade it. On Sundays, something hangs in the air, a hallelujah, a skitter of brass, but we can’t call it by name and it disappears.

  Then Massa and his gentlemen friends come to bet on the boys. They guffaw and shout, taking sides, red-faced on the edge of the boxing ring. There is more kicking, butting, and scuffling—the winner gets a dram of whiskey if he can drink it all in one swig without choking.

  Jason is bucking and prancing about—Massa said his name reminded him of some sailor, a hero who crossed an ocean, looking for a golden cotton field. Jason thinks he’s been born to great things—a suit with gold threads, vest and all. Now the winner is sprawled out under a tree and the sun, that weary tambourine, hesitates at the rim of the sky’s green light. It’s a crazy feeling that carries through the night; as if the sky were an omen we could not understand, the book that, if we could read, would change our lives.

  (1980)

  CARLA HARRYMAN (1952–)

  Magic (or Rousseau)

  In order to play, one needs magic and Rousseau and must remember play. Sometimes magic is the obscurest impostor in play. An obscure rationalization imposes the word magic on Rousseau.

  Now remember play has nothing to do with that Rousseauian freedom found in refusal.

  Refusal more than anything else ends play.

  And so we might play a game called the conjuring of Rousseau. It might go like this, let’s pretend that Jean-Jacques Rousseau is the pawn in our game. On one side of the board is society. On the other side of the board is solitude. We can each p
ick a goal. One of us tries to force Rousseau into society, the other tries to land him in solitude. Whoever gets the pawn to the goal wins. Let’s say Rousseau is walking along a Boulevard in silent reverie. The board, by the way, is made up of parks and boulevards, so when Rousseau “advances” he is always being advanced by way of a park or boulevard. Sometimes a player will draw a card that says, “What do you want, Jean-Jacques Rousseau?” If the spinner lands on I would like to go home, then the pawn is returned to the beginning and Rousseau sets out again from the starting spot. If the spinner lands on I would like to tell the truth, the player gets to spin again until he gets something he likes; since truth is bound to both solitude and society, this move becomes a matter of preference. In the center of the board is a personage with great powers: she is a witch. If Jean-Jacques lands on her spot it is because she has called him up. She calls him up, because his travels fascinate her. Now, this is extremely problematic. If Rousseau realizes that she has called him up, then he sees himself as a ghost. The player has a choice at this point, to get out of or stay in the ghost game. If it is decided to stay in the ghost game, Rousseau is provided with a series of options that he never recognized when he was alive. He can, for instance, opt to infiltrate society without being noticed. He can observe those who outlived him. He could, if he were on the ladder to revenge, scare them to death. They could become equals in death. Or he could live with the witch, who loves to make good on her resources. This he admires enormously; although, she does not quite consider him her equal. With her, his solitude is indeed complete, since no one in the game believes in her existence.