by Ron Padgett
Alone and Not Alone
Copyright © 2015 Ron Padgett
Cover design © 2014 by Jim Dine
Book design by Linda Koutsky
Author photograph © John Sarsgard
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Padgett, Ron, 1942–
[Poems. Selections]
Alone and not alone / Ron Padgett.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-56689-401-2 (softcover)
ISBN 978-1-56689-402-9 (eBook)
I. Title.
PS3566.A32A6 2014
811’.54—dc23
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
FIRST EDITION | FIRST PRINTING
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Some of the poems in this volume were published in Aphros, Cerise Press, Coconut, Connotation Press, Court Green, Courtland Review, For the One Fund Boston (Granary Books), Hanging Loose, Poem-a-Day (Academy of American Poets), Sentence, Tablet, Test Centre, and Upstreet.
for Wayne
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Dedication
What Poem
The Roman Numerals
Butterfly
Reality
The Chinese Girl
Smudges
It Takes Two
The First Time
Circles
Grandpa Brushed His Teeth
Coffee Man
Where Is My Head?
Survivor Guilt
The Young Cougar
Radio in the Distance
Face Value
The Plank and the Screw
102 Today
The Pounding Rabbit
Mountains and Songs
It All Depends
The Elevation of Ideals
Birgitte Hohlenberg
Pep Talk
Preface to Philosophy
You Know What
A Bit about Bishop Berkeley
The Step Theory
My ’75 Chevy
For A.
Art Lessons
A Few Ideas about Rabbits
The Value of Discipline
Pea Jacket
The Ukrainian Museum
The 1870s
One Thing Led to Another
The Rabbi with a Puzzle Voice
Syntactical Structures
The World of Us
Curtain
Homage to Meister Eckhart
The Incoherent Behavior of Most Lawn Furniture
This Schoolhouse Look
The Street
Paris Again
London, 1815
Of Copse and Coppice
Manifestation and Mustache
Shipwreck in General
French Art in the 1950s
Three Poems in Honor of Willem de Kooning I Felt
The Door to the River
Zot
Alone and Not Alone
Funder Acknowledgments
The Publisher’s Circle of Coffee House Press
About the Author
Alone and Not Alone
What Poem
What poem
were you thinking of,
my dear,
as you breezed out the door
in your long coat fur-tipped
at the top?
What animal
once wore that fur
and licked it
with a long, raspy tongue
that lolled to one side
in the afternoon shade?
If only you too
could lope across
the Serengeti Plain
and grab something
in your powerful jaws,
instead of pausing
at the door and saying,
as if in afterthought,
“Write a poem
while I’m out.”
The Roman Numerals
It must have been hard
for the Romans to multiply
—I don’t mean reproduce,
but to do that computation.
Step inside a roman numeral
for a moment, a long one
such as MDCCLIX. Look
at the columns and pediments
and architraves: you cannot move them,
but how beautiful they are
and august! However, try to multiply
MDCCCLXIV by MCCLVIII.
How did they do it?
I asked this question some years ago
and never found an answer
because I never looked for one,
but it is pleasant,
living with this question.
Perhaps the Romans weren’t good at math,
unlike the Arabs, who arrived
with baskets of numerals, plenty
for everyone. We still have
more than we need today.
I have a 6 and a 7 that,
when put side by side, form my age.
Come to think of it,
I’d rather be LXVII.
Butterfly
Chaung Tzu wrote about the man
who dreamed he was a butterfly
and when he woke up
wondered if he weren’t now
a butterfly dreaming he was a man.
I love this idea
though I doubt that Chaung Tzu
really thought that a man would think
he is a butterfly,
for it’s one thing to wake up
from a dream in the night
and another to spend your whole life
dreaming you are a man.
I have spent my whole life
thinking I was a boy, then a man,
also a person and an American
and a physical entity and a spirit
and maybe a little bit butterfly.
Maybe I should be more butterfly,
that is, lurch into a room
with bulging eyes and big flapping wings
that throw a choking powder
onto people who scream and fall dead,
almost. For I would rescue them
with the celestial music of my beauty
and my utter harmlessness,
my ætherial disregard of what they are.
Reality
Reality has a transparent veneer
that looks exactly like the reality beneath it.
If you look at anything,
your hands, for instance, and wait,
you will see it. Then
it will flicker and vanish,
though it is still there.
You must wait a day or two
before attempting to see it again,
for each attempt uses up
your current allotment of reality viewing.
Meanwhile there is a coffee shop
where you can sit and drink coffee,
and where you will be tempted
to look down at the cup and see
the transparent veneer again,
but that is only because you are overstimulated.
Do not order another cup. Or do.
It will have no effect on the veneer.
/>
Sometimes the veneer becomes detached
and moves slightly away from reality,
as when you look up and see a refrigerator
in refrigerator heaven, cold and quiet.
But then the veneer snaps back
to its former position and vanishes.
This is a normal occurrence—
do not be alarmed by it.
Instead, drive to the store
and buy something
that looks like milk, return
home and place it in the refrigerator.
Days go by, years go by, people
grow older and die, surrounded,
if they are lucky, by younger people
who do not know what to do
with feelings whose veneers
have slipped to the side, far
to the side, and are staying there
too long. But eventually they will grow hungry
and tired, and an image of dinner and bed
will float in like a leaf
that fell from who knows where, and sleep.
The Chinese Girl
When I order a coffee that is half-real, half-decaf, with half-and-half, the women behind the counter invariably give me a blank look and wait for something to come clear in their heads, and when it doesn’t I repeat, slowly, my order, gesturing with my fingers to demonstrate the half-real, then the half-decaf part. When it finally registers on them and they fill the cup, I point to the carton of half-and-half. Then one of the two—they work in pairs—asks, “Shu gah?”
However, the youngest of the morning crew of five understands better than the other four, so I always hope to have her wait on me, not only because of her better English but because she is the cutest. Of course not all Chinese girls look the same, but descriptions of them tend to sound the same, so I’m not sure that it would help to say that she has straight black hair, parted in the front and held in place by the bakery uniform’s light-green kerchief, a slightly flattened nose, and dark eyes, with a small mole on the right above her top lip. Her modest demeanor lends her an air of innocence. She is what, around eighteen?
I always look forward to seeing her on my weekly visit to the bakery. This morning when I walked slowly along the display case of dazzling muffins, buns, rolls, danishes, and other pastries, trying to decide among them, I heard her voice on the other side, asking, “Can I help you?” Never before had one of the crew left the cash register area to do this.
Concealing my surprise, I asked her, “Are the croissants ready yet?”
“I will see.”
When she came back from the kitchen she said, “Five minutes.”
“Then I’ll have one of these danishes.”
“You want small coffee, no? Half-regular, half-decaf, with half-and-half?”
Astonished, I said, “Yes, that’s right. You have a good memory.”
“I remember you,” she said, causing my heart to flutter. But my composure returned when she asked, “Shu gah?”
At the register she handed me the change from a five. I took a single and, pointedly ignoring the tip jar, handed it to her, saying “This is for you. Sheh sheh.”
“Thank you,” she said, lowering her eyes and almost imperceptibly drawing back.
I got the signal, so I headed toward an empty table, where I removed the plastic lid from the paper cup and took a bite out of the danish. A band of steam rose from the coffee, like a curtain on a miniature stage. The Chinese girl and I are living in a remote part of China. Our past lives have been erased. She is unspeakably devoted to me and I adore her. We say little, passing our days in a state of calm I could never have imagined.
Smudges
Smattering of gray puffs rocks are they
large ones but if you pick them up light
too light but fun to lift and marvel at
they don’t make “sense” they
aren’t broken they are what you
have laughing in you almost out
smudges come out of the rock
you breathe in and out the same gray rock
each time as if looped in a cartoon
of a sleeping man from whom z’s
emanate
Smattering of gray puffs a man is one of them
a cloud a smudge a powder of stone
from which a city arises with people in it
and ideas that flow toward you and through you
it’s too late it’s already happened to the next you
and the gray smudge that is your face turning
into your next face the one you forget
as soon as it happens as you fall away
among other smudges that are falling away
smudges and puffs falling away
It Takes Two
My replacement in the universe
is the little tyke who’ll soon arrive
and let me be superfluous if
and when I feel like being so.
I don’t really mean that.
It’s just the openness
of what will or might be,
when what matters most
is the right now of now,
which,
when I draw back and look reveals
an old fool in the foggy bliss
of whatever this morning is.
Straighten up, old thing!
You aren’t that old and he or she
will reach right up and grasp
some years and break them off
your psyche—what is it? like stardust?
glittering on those tiny tiny fingers.
The First Time
The first time Marcello went outside
the sun and moon were at his side
(his happy mom and happy dad)
(also the happiness known as granddad).
The first time Marcello breathed the outside air
he seemed to like it there.
The first time he got in a car
it zoomed him fast and far
(for such a little guy)
to Brooklyn: “Hi,
Brooklyn!” he didn’t shout:
his words were too little to get out.
But clearly in his sleeping face
he felt comfy in the human race.
Circles
Marcello sees
the sun is yellow.
But then at night
it’s white.
No, that’s the moon
or a white balloon
above his bed—
wait, it’s his head!
Colored circles rise and fall.
Marcello seems to like them all.
Grandpa Brushed His Teeth
This morning Grandpa brushed his teeth
so hard it knocked Marcello down
but he got back up to watch
Grandpa brush those teeth
Ah Grandpa brushing up and down
with joy he sang almost Glug glug!
The toothpaste tasted excellent
and the brush it zigged and zagged
It’s a good thing he has teeth to brush
and that he likes the brushing of them
The only missing ones are Wisdom
and Marcello does not need them
And Grandpa doesn’t either
Good-bye to Wisdom teeth and Wisdom
Buon giorno to Marcello
Little toothbrush fellow
Coffee Man
She might be hearing the burbling song of the bird outside, but it is impossible to tell, since she has rolled over and I think gone back to sleep. If I were to say quietly, “Good morning, dear, here is your coffee,” she would open her eyes and manage a groggy “Thank you.” But when she realizes that I am standing there without coffee, I would forget which tense I’m waiting to lift from the jar with the red lid in the kitchen.
Where Is My Head?
It makes you nervous to think not about death
but about dying and being dead yourse
lf
but when you don’t think about it
it doesn’t exist,
at least in your universe.
And since that’s the universe you happen to be in
you want to stay there:
you have to fix the world
and then save it,
you have to do that one thing
you can’t remember what it is
but you know it’s there somewhere
like the death you forgot for a moment.
I should have spent my life
meditating so deeply that the thought of death
would be relaxing like a breeze or a feather
but instead I have spent it promising myself
that someday I would go to that special place
in my psyche where the spirit enters and leaves
and make my peace with the beast I call myself.
I hate myself for dying, how
could I have done this!
But all I did was nothing
other than believe that I was actually important!
Everything my mother did proved it.
But when she died she just glided away—
she didn’t mind at all.
She didn’t think she was important
and she had a farmgirl’s view of dying:
chickens do it all the time,
they run around the yard with blood
gushing from where their heads used to be.
