by Ron Padgett
I wish I could do that!
In Paris the heads that dropped into the basket
—were they still thinking about the executioner?
Today I am my own executioner.
Survivor Guilt
It’s very easy to get.
Just keep living and you’ll find yourself
getting more and more of it.
You can keep it or pass it on,
but it’s a good idea to keep a small portion
for those nights when you’re feeling so good
you forget you’re human. Then drudge it up
and float down from the ceiling
that is covered with stars that glow in the dark
for the sole purpose of being beautiful for you,
and as you sink their beauty dims and goes out—
I mean it flies out the nearest door or window,
its whoosh raising the hair on your forearms.
If only your arms were green, you could have two small lawns!
But your arms are just there and you are kaput.
It’s all your fault, anyway, and it always has been—
the kind word you thought of saying but didn’t,
the appalling decline of human decency, global warming,
thermonuclear nightmares, your own small cowardice,
your stupid idea that you would live forever—
all tua culpa. John Phillip Sousa
invented the sousaphone, which is also your fault.
Its notes resound like monstrous ricochets.
But when you wake up, your body
seems to fit fairly well, like a tailored suit,
and you don’t look too bad in the mirror.
Hi there, feller!
Old feller, young feller, who cares?
Whoever it was who felt guilty last night,
to hell with him. That was then.
The Young Cougar
The doors swing open and in walks a young cougar wearing white shoes and light-blue socks, come to help his father. “Where do we put this in the registry?” one servant asks another. Or they were wearing the shoes and socks.
Radio in the Distance
for Yvonne Jacquette
Beneath the earth covered with men
with snow atop their heads, down
to where it is dark and deep, to where
the big black vibrating blob of wobble
is humming its one and only note, I lie,
orange hair not in the idea of diagonal,
a Betty not composed of vertical fish
or dog with grid-mark cancellations,
but easy as an orchestra of toy atoms
lazy with buzz and fizzle in their drift
as if above this late and lost Manhattan
spread out like a diagram of what we want
from heaven, wherever it is when we think
we know what it is and even when it really is.
Face Value
From a face comes a body an entire body
and from a body everything
but I can’t face you
fully
not yet
maybe never
and even if I did or thought I did
how would I know
How would I know
what face value is
From a face comes face value
and from face value a lot of baling wire
—the face scribbled over with dark coils of it
I was born in Kentucky almost
There were no faces there
so I was born elsewhere
from inside a fencepost
to which barbed wire had been affixed
by Frederic Remington
The air was cool, the night calm
and each star had a face
like a movie star’s or someone in the family
They too had star quality I thought
but they had statue quality
and then turned sideways
like music blending into fabric and little curtains
along the kitchen windows
attractive kitchen windows
Now you can sit down at this table
and look me square in the eye
and tell me what you’ve been wanting to
or you can stand up like a photograph on a piano
and sing to me
a song that has no words or music
Which is it? —But
a heavy magnetic force pulls you to the wall
and holds you there
As soon as you get used to it
it lets you go
for a while
and then your heavy magnetic force pulls the wall to you
and you walk around with a wall stuck to your side
The Wall of Forgetting
it’s called
but it’s not a wall it’s a mirror
that picks your face up off the floor
and whirls it onto a head
that has gone on without you
The Plank and the Screw
There is one thing.
In a fishing village on the coast of Norway
an idea came forth and spread
over the country and from there
to the rest of the world, namely
that floating inside the sun was its power source:
a plank and a screw
that had come loose from it,
and as long as they floated around,
never far one from the other,
the sun would continue to burn.
Let’s try to imagine how hot it is
one inch from the sun.
Now that we have found it
impossible to imagine
we can go on
to the next thing we do not understand.
Meanwhile, the plank and the screw
continue to float—
the plank is roughly an eight-foot
one-by-ten, the screw a three-inch flathead—
but since there is nothing around them
except burning gas
they are both highly visible.
Many years passed.
Gradually the idea that had come from Norway
became so assimilated into the everyday lives
of people that they never thought of it—
it changed from an idea into people,
so they forgot
and for all practical purposes
the idea ceased to exist.
But everyone has inside them
a plank and a screw
floating around.
Everyone is warm enough
to be alive.
102 Today
If Wystan Auden were alive today
he’d be a small tangle of black lines
on a rumpled white bedsheet,
his little eyes looking up at you.
What did you bring?
Some yellow daffodils and green stems.
Or did they bring you?
Auden once said,
“Where the hell is Bobby?”
and we looked around,
but there was no Bobby there.
Ah, Auden, no Bobby for you.
Just these daffodils in a clean white vase.
The Pounding Rabbit
After a clock designed by Neya Churyoku (1897–1987)
If you know the Japanese folktale
about the rabbit that ended up
on the moon, you will not be puzzled
by a table clock depicting a rabbit
pounding rice cakes on the moon,
but if you do not know this story
you will look at the clock and pound
your own head in disbelief,
as if to knock from it the spirit
you wish to offer to the gods
who munch the rice cakes
and never turn to say thank you
except by sending down a genius
to crea
te such a clock, such a rabbit.
Mountains and Songs
Mountains of song
exert their force up through the earth
and rise above it
Peasants and villagers
cling to it as it rises
and they sing
and then they don’t
for this is a pause
in the history of the world
and its mountains and songs
I saw them rising
and I knew it was weeping
this rising
for the mountains were going away
the villagers and peasants too
folded away in cupboards
in mountains and songs
It All Depends
Que reste-t-il de nos amours?
—CHARLES TRENET
Et nos amours, faut-il qu’il m’en souvienne?
—APOLLINAIRE
But it is not love that I would speak of
for as you see, I am of
the nineteenth century, when love was
. . . well, it all depends,
and I can’t get out of it,
whatever this love is.
I will die in it and I hope
of it, it is the preamble
to walking in and sitting
down and saying “Hi”
before anything else has a chance
to happen. And then
of course nothing does,
which is why you keep saying it—
you can’t get out
of saying it. So you may as well
take off your hat and stay a while,
which is what you always planned on anyway.
The nineteenth century,
what a tremendous thing
to be in love in!
Cottages go by
and music piles up
like excited dead people.
They stop but don’t,
like sleeping people who are alive,
but it’s not that easy,
the century is more complicated
than one had expected
now that everyone has a pot and a pan
but not a love of the pot and the pan.
Still, look at those sailing ships
on the wide main and the stairways
that spiral into heaven
and that bird with a long red beard
sticking straight up!
It’s our chance to separate ourselves
into numerous pieces and have them
go in different directions,
reassembling what time had dispersed
in the form of granules and mist.
Or was it even really there?
A nightingale warbled
the tune it was supposed to
so the world would calm down.
There’s nothing wrong with resting
alongside this shady rill and taking medications
as if they were piles of stones placed at intervals
by people who must have had a meaning
in mind but with no thought of telling you
what it was, for they didn’t know that you
would exist. Therefore, lie down and rest.
The afternoon is mild and your love
is not driving you crazy, temporarily.
A rest might give you the strength
to look love straight in the eye
and not fade into granules and mist.
Reverdy said
“One must try to live”—
the statement of a man
who didn’t love
or wasn’t loved
enough. A small rectangle
of light lay on his floor
and his shoe
flashed as it went by.
His wife was hidden
in the kitchen, his girlfriend
hidden in celebrity,
his God just hidden.
Pierre opened the kitchen door,
the trap door of fame,
and the side of the cathedral,
but there was nothing there,
and when he opened his heart
he found only a rectangle
of sunlight on the floor.
But it was enough.
Perhaps his wife was hiding
her love in the kitchen,
the dark kitchen in Solesmes,
where I saw her walking
briskly down the street
at the age of 97 or 98,
the same street
a few years later
she would move slowly up
and down the way
to lie down in the tomb
next to Pierre, her Pierre.
By then the girlfriend
had twirled into Eternity,
and God had hidden so deeply
in Pierre’s poems
Pierre didn’t know
He was there—
He had gone back and disappeared
beneath the period
that ended Pierre’s first book,
like a dark glint.
But God too was trying to live.
He hasn’t been around lately,
which is perhaps why
the landscape is so cheerful—
it gets to be just itself,
brutally wonderfully so, and birds
veer and chirp and lift
their wings to see what’s there.
It’s air.
And so singing.
“But that’s what I did,”
says Pierre
out of nowhere.
“And you can’t tell
if the singing made the air
or the other way around—
or both, which is most likely.”
And then, like a Frenchman,
he left, before I had a chance
to throw him around the room,
but with respect,
affection, and mountains,
the kind they had in the century
he was born in, mountains as black
as his tomb, which I am unable
to throw around now
that his wife’s in there too.
Henriette: her name.
(Henri: his real first name.)
(Her name a little feminine version of his.)
(But we all get smaller and smaller.)
(Hoping to fit
inside a rectangle of sunlight.)
(And not be a shoe!)
(Though have the calmness of a shoe.)
(Beneath the bed at night.)
I will tell you this tonight.
The Elevation of Ideals
To construct a set of ideals, a toy tool kit suffices, provided that the handles of the hammer, saw, and screwdriver are of wood and painted light blue. However, a full set of adult tools enables the builder to work more rapidly and with greater precision. Of equal importance are the raw materials, though it is possible to use various bits and pieces that one finds along the way. Remember, though, never to use metaphors in the construction, for over time they will shift, and the entire construction will sag and perhaps collapse. (Of course these rules apply only if you live on dry land; another set covers undersea construction.)
(If you end one ideal in parentheses, you must begin the next also in parentheses. Otherwise, the joint will not bond.) To construct a solid set of ideals, do not begin too early, for all too often the ideals do not turn out to be ideals at all: they are ideas, and, like bubbles, they tend to float away and pop. In doing so they can be beautiful, but æsthetic beauty is not of great importance here, unless it happens to be the same as moral beauty, which happens very rarely in modern societies. So allow your ideals to evolve through the decades. If you cherish them and don’t think about them too much, they will change themselves by rotating on their axes while flashing on and off, to show you that all is well. When you turn fifty, they stop flashing, and for a while you think they have vanished, but it is
you who have vanished, so thoroughly that even you do not know you are there. But you are.
You are, the way your mother is there, and your father, too. At this point you can obtain a set of tools and start thinking about the construction, how to begin it and where. These choices will be up to you: some choose the head, some the heart, and others even elect to build it outside themselves. The choice of location might bedevil you, but I will tell you now that the location doesn’t really matter, except to you.
Deciding on the design of the construction can prove extremely difficult. This is normal, so don’t fret about it. Just pick up the first ideal and see how it feels in your hand, then pick up a tool in the other hand. You will know immediately if they match. If they don’t, try others. If nothing seems to work, you are not really fifty, and it is best to put the tools away and try later.
But do not postpone the resumption too long, for you might have grown so old that you no longer remember your project, or you may not be physically strong enough to make difficult moral decisions. Assuming, however, that you do resume, aim to build a perfect structure, no matter how small, for if the one you do complete is good enough it will float up of its own accord and stop in midair, where you can sing to it any time you want. If a door or window falls off, do not be concerned. Another door or window will appear in its place. And anyway, you will be inside, looking out.
Birgitte Hohlenberg
for Bill Berkson
I do not know who Birgitte Hohlenberg was
or why C. A. Jensen painted her portrait, in 1826,
