by Ron Padgett
but I’m glad he did, because then I could see it
in the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen
and buy a postcard of it and send it to my wife:
“Isn’t she beautiful?” She being
Birgitte Hohlenberg and the painting of her.
I don’t know which of them I love more.
Both are bright, calm, and sweet—
she had a way with beauty. You see it
in the brown satin dress with fluffy sleeves
and big white collar edged in lace, the hat
a light white puff around her head
and neatly tied beneath the chin,
her curly chestnut hair an echo
of the ribbon curling around the brim
and returning over the shoulders
to a loose knot at the collarbone,
her slender neck rising to a face whose high color elevates
how interested she is to be sitting there
looking straight at you without the slightest hint of carnality.
Just being in her presence would be enough
for me, now, at my age.
When did I send this card? August 15,
2001. That long ago. Before the Towers came down—
before a lot of things came down. But she
has stayed up, on my wife’s dresser. How
she died I don’t know, or at what age.
C. A. Jensen lived to 78, a long life
back then. Good for him.
I hope he was as happy
as he makes me every time I see his picture.
I hope you see it too.
Pep Talk
Dinner is a damned nice thing
as are breakfast and lunch
when they’re good and with
the one you love.
That’s a kind of dancing
sitting down and not moving
but what dances exactly
we do not know nor
need to know,
it is dancing us around
and nothing is moving
in the miracle of dinner
breakfast and lunch
and all the in-betweens
that give us pep.
Preface to Philosophy
An ugly day it must have been, when the first man stood face to face with the idea of the worthlessness and absurdity of life.
—W. MACNEILE DIXON
But it wasn’t such an ugly day when I read Dixon’s remark, at the age of fifteen, because I had already been charmed by the idea of the worthlessness and absurdity of life, which seemed far more sophisticated than the idea that life is meaningful and wonderful.
Now as I read it again for the first time in fifty-four years, what strikes me is not the truth of his statement, but the image of an early man’s finding himself “face to face” with an idea; that is, with a ghostly being three times his size, wavering before him and communicating without speaking. Of course this is not what Dixon meant to convey; he was using “face to face” metaphorically, as an expressive device. But now I am face to face with his metaphor.
However, I can escape it by trying to picture the room in which I first read his remark, my bedroom, with its front window and side window. Sitting at my desk, I could have gazed out the front window and across the street to the window of my friend, from whom I had bought the book in which Dixon’s writing appears, but if I was propped up in bed I could not have seen out the window directly behind me, whose curtain I usually kept drawn so that anyone stepping onto our porch would not glance in and see the back of my head. I did not want anyone to look at the back of my head.
As for its having been an ugly day, who knows? That is, “ugly” meaning what? Stormy? Dark? Probably the latter. Again he is speaking metaphorically, referring here to the psychological weather of the human nearly struck down by an idea, as I am struck, though not down, by the idea of a dark cloud in a protohuman shape fifteen feet high that descended and stood before the man and emanated the idea of the worthlessness and absurdity of life.
What made the man believe it? And then go on, as I have gone on?
You Know What
Every once in a while
it occurs to me
that I am a vibration
as hard as a living creature
and that that creature is me.
It occurs when I look out of my eyes
at it and it skulks away
into the dark area.
But you know what?
Take your philosophy
and put it in a paper bag
and carry it to a destination
and open it and see
if it looks back at you
and if it does
then you are occurring
because it is occurring too.
I learned that in my childhood
and I did have a childhood it was better than most
but I got nervous
when my mother got nervous
and my father was always quietly nervous.
We were a bundle of secret nerves sometimes
and at others we had quite a good time
especially my mother and me.
We would sing duets in the car
in harmony.
Sometimes she’d take the alto sometimes I would.
It was oddly satisfying
to come to a stop sign
and stop.
Lithuania
wasn’t something I had heard of
and Stalin was I thought a cartoon character
because he had only one name and a mustache.
No one in America had a mustache
because Hitler had had one and he
wasn’t funny he was shouting
and shaking his face around a tight nervous fit.
Our family was a little nervous but not like that.
He had a real problem we had a slight one.
One day someone told me to relax.
I didn’t know what they meant,
I thought we were just the way we were.
We had names and identities and we knew
who each other was and what to say.
So what is “relaxing”? It is turning
into someone else in your own body
which is what is happening every moment anyway
but so slowly we can’t see it—
in effect it isn’t occurring
though really it is.
A Bit about Bishop Berkeley
Bishop Berkeley
is fond of saying,
in the middle of making a point,
“This is obvious
to anyone who takes a moment
to examine it with an attentive mind.”
Then he says
“Abstract ideas do not exist,”
which sounds odd
until you see what he means
by abstract
and remember that he says
that language makes everything unclear,
though we need it
to get what we want.
He convinced investors
to give him a tidy sum
to open a school for colonial
and Native American children,
but the final funding fell through
so he bought Rhode Island
or a chunk of it
and went back to England
and told his investors,
“Abstract ideas do not exist.”
This is obvious.
And oh, his name was George.
The Step Theory
An idea went by like a bird
and a bird went by like a cloud
and a cloud went by like a moment:
this is the Step Theory of Reality
and its by-product the Ziggurat Configuration.
Then a bird went by like an idea—
the idea of the Step Theory itself,
for no one thinks of it anymore,
because
its pieces lock together seamlessly,
the way a play on words
is just words and not just words
at the same time, for a moment.
It can’t come back
because it never went anywhere,
unlike a cloud that can’t come back
because it went everywhere.
And so we jump around and sputter,
to the great amusement
of our higher selves,
the ones we can’t find,
their laughter echoing forever
in the few moments we have.
That’s step 1.
Now sweep idea, bird, and cloud
into a little pile and put them in a box.
(They will come in handy later.)
For step 2 you must forget
who you aren’t, that is,
everyone else, even though you
are part everyone else.
This in itself is not difficult:
you do it all the time
when you’re not looking.
What is difficult is what follows:
you must make yourself
as flat as a pancake
and try to avoid having syrup
poured onto you.
Most people will not
pour syrup onto a human pancake,
but there are a few who would.
Once you are flat, just lie there
for a while. Look at those clouds
and the bird that flew into the idea of them.
Eventually the Ziggurat Configuration
comes into play. The weather is hot and humid
but the ziggurat keeps climbing itself
until it gets to the top, then
it comes back down, only to climb back up,
and so on. I once had an aunt like this
—there was no stopping her—
her face in profile formed a ziggurat.
We children put glasses of water
on the steps, thus representing the soul
without knowing that it takes a while
to learn that we have one, but
by that time the soul had vanished
into the process of being itself,
like the idea, the bird, and the cloud:
song, song, and song.
Step 3 is for later,
but I can tell you now
that it involves rolling green pastureland
you step into but not onto
and follow your nose,
no cloud, no bird, no idea.
My ’75 Chevy
Out in the yard
sits my 1975 Chevy pickup truck,
repainted red with a white roof,
body smooth, carburetor rebuilt, new tires,
new dashboard, black leather seat covers,
new floorboards, and two new side mirrors.
In a timeless yard—
it creates its own time zone. 1975.
I can’t drive simultaneously in 1975 and 2012,
but I do
because when the truck goes forward
I enter the sliding zone known
as Miles Per Hour
and I’m just someone in something red.
For A.
The little blue heron’s back again
Was he here when
Joe was here too
with Bill and me and you
when we were all just fifty?
If the three of us add twenty
we’ll get something unreal
unlike what we are and feel
which is what Joe
couldn’t imagine and ever know:
how my grandma said now and then
“I’m in good shape for the shape I’m in.”
Art Lessons
Narrative Painting
The Madonna never walks.
The Portrait
Bronzino did for the portrait what the portrait did for the sitter.
Still Life
The best still lifes have emptiness.
The Self-Portrait
The self-portrait did for the self what the self did for the portrait.
Landscape
Landscape is a window through which you see what you thought.
Sculpture
Don’t move.
A Few Ideas about Rabbits
It’s hard to understand what
a rabbit is
It lifts a paw
and hesitates
For a moment its nose
and mouth are all cat
and those eyes, so worried
so harmless
but it might scratch you
accidentally
and that camel back
and tiger crouch
ears of lemur
perked up
Mouse-kangaroo
The rabbit runs around
eating and doing arithmetic
There is the story of the grateful king
who offered his subject anything
he wanted, and the subject said
Take this chessboard and put
a coin on the first square
then double that amount for the second
and so on, to which the king
readily consented
and when they counted
it turned out to be
a billion trillion coins
(or something like that)
more than the richest king
could afford
Imagine if the man had asked
for rabbits
Well that’s what Nature asked for.
In Australia I think
there’s an area that has
ten rabbits per square yard
Ah, we must shoot them
cry certain Australians
and others say No
ship them to a place
that has no rabbits
But there’s a reason
there are no rabbits there
like at the North Pole
or in the Gobi Desert
or on Park Avenue
Anyway I do not trust a rabbit
because I have no idea
what it is thinking
I trust a worm because it isn’t thinking
If rabbits could say
“I will hop into this garden
and eat the lettuce”
I would like them more
The Value of Discipline
I am very disappointed in you, Myron.
You are a very smart boy,
and we had high hopes for you.
But now this.
I don’t know.
Go to your room.
Myron heads toward his room,
but does his head hang low?
No way!
He is looking straight ahead
and feeling a hot black liquid
trickle through his heart.
Great galleons
bound through the rough seas
and on them bearded men
are shouting sailor things
as if to the wind.
Back in his room
the objects look older.
What joy to make them
walk the plank!
Avast! Avaunt! Splash! Garrrr!
Pea Jacket
Years ago I had an old pea jacket
Slightly scruffy but not unclean
was my overall look and I lacked
the easy assurance that comes with money
because I had very little
It was okay, not having money
I wasn’t starving or lacking anything I needed
though by contemporary standards
I should have been envious or angry
I wasn’t
All I cared about was my wife and friends and family
Books writing perception great art and gigantic metaphysical questions floating in on good humor
Society could take care of itself more
or less
(It turned out less)
and I was happy enough and eager
I think what I mean is I was young
so that no matter what anyone might think of my jacket
I liked it it fit well and was warm in the New York winter
collar turned up and hands snug in pockets
It came from a secondhand clothing store
at the corner of Bowery and Bleecker maybe it
had belonged to a drunken sailor
What do you do with a drunken sailor early in the morning?
Put him in bed with the captain’s daughter!
There was a label inside with his name and serial number scrawled on it
It felt odd wearing his name I snipped it out
I don’t have anything monumental or metaphoric to say about my jacket
It’s just a pleasure to remember it and how good it felt on me
Then one day I started wearing something else
and a few years later I gave the jacket to someone I liked I don’t recall who
The Ukrainian Museum
Just walking into the new and beautifully designed Ukrainian Museum was a pleasure: varnished hardwood floors, white walls, clean lines, understated lighting, and the luxury of newness. An older Ukrainian Museum had been located in a second-floor apartment in a tenement building on Second Avenue, without even a sign outside, several rooms of dismal paintings in drab light; the one time I ventured in, there was not a single soul in the place, not even a guard. Twenty years later the museum moved a few blocks up the street to a space protected by two security checkpoints. I was greeted, if that is the word, by a woman who coldly asked me what I wanted. The two exhibition rooms were slightly larger than closets. Now, walking into this third incarnation made me feel so light and carefree that I had to be reminded to buy a ticket.
