The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem

by Jeremy Noel-Tod

  Eileen Myles (1995)

  Prose Poem

  The morning coffee. I’m not sure why I drink it. Maybe it’s the ritual of the cup, the spoon, the hot water, the milk, and the little heap of brown grit, the way they come together to form a nail I can hang the day on. It’s something to do between being asleep and being awake. Surely there’s something better to do, though, than to drink a cup of instant coffee. Such as meditate? About what? About having a cup of coffee. A cup of coffee whose first drink is too hot and whose last drink is too cool, but whose many in-between drinks are, like Baby Bear’s porridge, just right. Papa Bear looks disgruntled. He removes his spectacles and swivels his eyes onto the cup that sits before Baby Bear, and then, after a discreet cough, reaches over and picks it up. Baby Bear doesn’t understand this disruption of the morning routine. Papa Bear brings the cup close to his face and peers at it intently. The cup shatters in his paw, explodes actually, sending fragments and brown liquid all over the room. In a way it’s good that Mama Bear isn’t there. Better that she rest in her grave beyond the garden, unaware of what has happened to the world.

  Ron Padgett (1995)

  from Kuchh Vakya

  The Well

  Mother’s money lies hidden under a sheet of paper in a green box.

  Father stands before a dark almirah.

  Late at night, my brother gazes into the deep well. He searches for the glass he can never find near the earthen pot.

  Father is delighted to see the red tomatoes in the field. The gardener drags himself after him. In a corner of the field, the gardener’s wife lulls her child to sleep sitting on the black soil.

  Walking in her sleep, mother finds her way to the well. They fail to recognize each other.

  Grandmother mumbles: ‘On dark nights ghosts fill water at the well.’

  ‘I can never find the glass,’ my brother screams, parched with thirst. Petrified, mother does not move.

  The harsingar tree in the courtyard covers father’s dead body with white flowers.

  Sari

  Father is sitting at a long dining table eating a roti with a knife and fork. Fascinated, I sit beside him watching his strange performance.

  Mother sits in an empty room as finely spun shadows drown her. Father’s death slowly spreads over her sari.

  Grandfather’s lonely hands grope over a wall for the hook on which he can hang his cap.

  Grandmother mumbles quietly, ‘Is the old man asleep again?’

  When I insist, Mother changes her white sari.

  Where the road takes a sharp turn, Father walks towards the sky.

  Udayan Vajpeyi (1995), translated from the Hindi by Alok Bhalla

  The Ice House

  Every Sunday afternoon we used to go on our Sunday afternoon run. There were two routes. Route one: from Darfield via Goldthorpe to Hickleton with its churchyard with the skulls in the gate, turn left at Hickleton crossroads for a Danny’s ice cream, then past Bilham Sand quarry to Hooton Pagnell, described by Arthur Mee in his Counties of England as a Jewel in a sea of coal, then past the mysterious church in the middle of a field at Frickley and back home. Route two: through Darfield to Millhouses, turn left at Holly House, the old pit owner’s house where the beekeeper lived, through Middlecliffe, once called Plevna, and Great Houghton, past Houghton Woods to a Danny’s ice cream at Brierley crossroads. A childhood of Sundays dominated by mysterious buildings and Danny’s Ice Cream. And my dad would always say the same things as we drove along. Past a house at the edge of Great Houghton he’d point and say ‘We now pass the famous house of Dick Turpin, famous for his horse Black Beauty. And now we approach the ducky pond, famous for the ducks.’

  And for all those years of Sundays as we sat at Brierley crossroads eating ice cream, I never knew this place was here: the ice house, deep in the woods that the man at Burntwood Hall created for his pleasure. A treasure under the ground, melting away.

  Ian McMillan (1994)

  How Everything Has Turned Around

  We are relieved at last to have left the shadowlands. You will remember he sat at the table looking straight at me with tears in his eyes. He was tame and composed, he was faithful. Nothing he could do when having to love seemed like too much of an effort, like playing sport, like getting fit. Perhaps that endurance, the pining away, the sexless resignation, became old and tedious. Now everything has turned, is all lit up, the afternoon sun covers the walls with shimmering shadows. The difference is dazzling, worth bright gouache paintings and on these different days he can throw rice for the doves. Now he can carry you out of your fainting, pick up the lipsticks dropped from low windows, search with great care for dry parts of the tissue, switch on car radios and hope for Bach preludes. How everything has turned around as we never know things will things do.

  Pam Brown (1994)

  Hammer and Nail

  ‘Would you like to see where our little girl is buried?’ my friend asks as we walk between stucco shrines and wreaths of brilliant flowers. Even a plane’s propeller is attached to a pilot’s grave as if the whole thing might spin off into the wind. One man’s relatives built a castle over his remains, with turrets and towers, to match the castle he built for his body in life. If you stand at a certain angle you can see both castles at once, the bigger one he lived in off on the horizon. An archway says in Spanish, ‘Life is an illusion. Death is the reality. Respect the dead whom you are visiting now.’ We hike down the hill toward the acres of ‘free graves’. Here people can claim any space they want without paying, but also risk having someone buried on top of them. In the fields beyond the cemetery, women walk slowly with buckets slung over their shoulders on poles. Black cows graze on knee-high grass. The crossbar from the marker to my friend’s child’s grave has come loose and lies off to one side. My friend kneels, pressing the simple blue crossbar back into the upright piece, wishing for a hammer and nail. The cross has delicate scalloped edges and says nothing. No words, no dates. It reminds me of the simplicity of folded hands, though I know there were years of despair. My friend says, ‘Sometimes I am still very sad. But I no longer ask, “What if …?” It was the tiniest casket you ever saw.’ On the small plots in either direction, families have stuck tall pine branches into dirt. The needles droop, completely dried by now, but they must have looked lovely as miniature forests for the first few days.

  Naomi Shihab Nye (1994)

  In the Off-Season

  The sea has frozen to a stop. Ice stretches to the horizon. Little humps of sand, of water mixed with sand so thoroughly that granules of this new matter have the texture of firn, stick out smartly where the surf used to pound the shore, and beyond that a great frozen slab opens out like a cold hand, lined with the details of waves, crests, white horses of snow: a fleeting image of air in a furtive coupling of wind and spray, an alphabet of meanings receding to the horizon, repeated to infinity, an infinity of vibrations and still-born interferences. I think of a deserted Venice. I move without a shadow and enter the deep, lost in the sound of ice scrunching under my feet. But if I stop there will be a withering silence wrapped in the whisper of melting snow, of crumbling crests and friezes more delicate than soot. Here and there are cracks, as flashy as lightning, the contours of ice-floes, the blueprints of disintegration. And I imagine that I could mistake it all for one huge jigsaw puzzle, sit down and wait till water washes away the pattern, the frozen craziness of it, until I sink, slowly, to the bottom.

  From up there, you won’t hear me. Perhaps heaven is like this. So white, you can’t look at it, so silent, you can’t hear a word. I lie down on the snow and try to feel, running my fingers over the fragile summits, frozen geysers, gelid eruptions, icy foliage. The sky is reflected in this … mirror, so completely that when I lie on my back the clouds seem to pass through me like sand in an hourglass and – stiffening, coagulating into ribbons of snow – they unfurl in long lines of print which in a moment will be quickened by a touch of sunshine. A few more turns of the body and the sea is like
the roof of a white cave, beneath which I hang like a bat, with the sky underneath like a sea.

  And at night – I stay for the night – that crash and creak of ice, grinding and rumbling as it plays with the cables of ships, in a violent effort – to keep things moving? On the moon’s behalf? Or some other satellite’s? To mould these snowy crests into a smile? A stealthy smile when no-one is looking? And when no-one looks I spot a whirlpool and a welter of the waves, a blizzard of shapes: shadowy headless forms, of serpents coiled into rings, of the frenzied dance of the Maenads, and Athenian magistrates.

  Andrzej Sosnowski (1994), translated from the Polish by Rod Mengham

  from Lawn of Excluded Middle

  1

  When I say I believe that women have a soul and that its substance contains two carbon rings the picture in the foreground makes it difficult to find its appearance back where the corridors get lost in ritual sacrifice and hidden bleeding. But the four points of the compass are equal on the lawn of the excluded middle where full maturity of meaning takes time the way you eat a fish, morsel by morsel, off the bone. Something that can be held in the mouth, deeply, like darkness by someone blind or the empty space I place at the center of each poem to allow penetration.

  2

  I’m looking out the window at other windows. Though the pane masquerades as transparent I know it is impenetrable just as too great a show of frankness gives you a mere paper draft on revelations. As if words were passports, or arrows that point to the application we might make of them without considering the difference of biography and life. Still, depth of field allows the mind to drift beyond its negative pole to sun catching on a maple leaf already red in August, already thinner, more translucent, preparing to strip off all that separates it from its smooth skeleton. Beautiful, flamboyant phrase that trails off without predicate, intending disappearance by approaching it, a toss in the air.

  3

  I put a ruler in my handbag, having heard men talk about their sex. Now we have correct measurements and a stickiness between collar and neck. It is one thing to insert yourself into a mirror, but quite another to get your image out again and have your errors pass for objectivity. Vitreous. As in humor. A change in perspective is caused by the ciliary muscle, but need not be conciliatory. Still, the eye is a camera, room for everything that is to enter, like the cylinder called the satisfaction of hollow space. Only language grows such grass-green grass.

  4

  Even if a woman sits at a loom, it does not mean she must weave a cosmogony or clothes to cover the emptiness underneath. It might just be a piece of cloth which, like any center of attention, absorbs the available light the way a waterfall can form a curtain of solid noise through which only time can pass. She has been taught to imagine other things, but does not explain, disdaining defense while her consciousness streams down the rapids. The light converges on what might be the hollow of desire or the incomplete self, or just lint in her pocket. Her hour will also come with the breaking of water.

  5

  Because I refuse to accept the opposition of night and day I must pit other, subtler periodicities against the emptiness of being an adult. Their traces inside my body attempt precariously, like any sign, to produce understanding, but though nothing may come of that, the grass is growing. Can words play my parts and also find their own way to the house next door as rays converge and solve their differences? Or do notes follow because drawn to a conclusion? If we don’t signal our love, reason will eat our heart out before it can admit its form of mere intention, and we won’t know what has departed.

  6

  All roads lead, but how does a sentence do it? Nothing seems hidden, but it goes by so fast when I should like to see it laid open to view whether the engine resembles combustion so that form becomes its own explanation. We’ve been taught to apply solar principles, but must find on our own where to look for Rome the way words rally to the blanks between them and thus augment the volume of their resonance.

  Rosmarie Waldrop (1993)

  The Word-Gulag

  They’ve opened a new gulag. The word-gulag.

  I go there every week, and take a shopping bag filled with fresh fruit, a bar of soap and a few tins of condensed milk. I call out a prisoner’s name at random, then wait in the visitors’ room with the gesturing crowd. One by one, the words file out of a little door and stand in front of us on the other side of the wire. Pale. Trembling. Haggard. Shattered.

  ‘Speak!’ the guard barks while he patrols the corridor that divides us, clanging his keys against the grille.

  No one responds. The words can’t reply because their jaws are visibly broken. Nor can the visitors because, as they’ve just suddenly realised – they really should have wised up to this earlier – the gulag has robbed them of all their best words.

  ‘Visiting time is over,’ the guard shouts, drawing a curtain we hadn’t noticed before.

  Some barely audible words burst out, but nobody could tell which side of the grille they were coming from. They were probably words of goodbye.

  Abdellatif Laâbi (1993), translated from the Arabic by André Naffis-Sahely

  Dustie-Fute

  When I opened my window and reached for the yoghurt cooling on the outside ledge, it had gone. All that remained was a single Scottish word bewildered by the Paris winter frost and the lights of its riverbank motorways. What can dustie-fute have to say to a night like this? How can it dangle its hyphen down into the rue Geoffrey L’Asnier where Danton stayed on the eve of revolution? How can it tame this strangeness for me or change me into the cupolas and flagstones I so desire yet still notice every time I walk among them? Does the ‘auld alliance’ of words and things stand a chance among the traffics and pimps in the Publicis Saint-Germain? For it’s not as if dustie-fute were my familiar. I could easily confuse dustie-fute with elfmill which is the sound made by a worm in the timber of a house, supposed by the vulgar to be preternatural. These words are as foreign as the city they have parachuted into, dead words slipping on the sill of a living metropolis. They are extremes that touch like dangerous wires and the only hope for them, for us, is the space they inhabit, a room Cioran speaks of, veering between dilettantism and dynamite. Old Scots word, big French city and in between abysmal me: ane merchand or creamer, quha hes no certain dwelling place, quhair the dust may be dicht fra hes feete or schone. Dustie-fute, a stranger, equivalent to fairand-man, at a loss in the empty soul of his ancestors’ beautiful language and in the soulless city of his compeers living the 21st century now and scoffing at his medieval wares. Yet here, precisely here, is their rendez-vous and triumphantly, stuffed down his sock, an oblique sense, the dustie-fute of ‘revelry’, the acrobat, the juggler who accompanies the toe-belled jongleur with his merchant’s comic fairground face. He reaches deep into his base Latinity, into his pede-pulverosi and French descendants pull out their own pieds poudreux. Dustie-fute remembers previous lives amid the plate glass of Les Halles. They magnify his motley, his mid-oranges, his hawker lyrics and for a second Beaubourg words graze Scottish glass then glance apart. In this revelry differences copulate, become more visible and bearable and, stranger than the words or city I inhabit, I reach for my yoghurt and find it there.