The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem

by Jeremy Noel-Tod

  The Stumbling Block is an ark of extinction. A bouillon hive of the murdered past, frozen dry to a mass. Something has warmed its corner, the oxoed grit bleeds a vein of contagion, virulent in its passion to embrace and swim in human tides.

  The Stumbling Block has become a pillow to the dispossessed. It can be moulded to the need of its companion, kneaded and pummelled so as not to lose its hunched purchase on the slippery pavement. They will warble and breathe into it, it becomes their mother as their alcoholic dribble writes a sad and caustic text in its interior. This wet laser chisel entwines their lineage with fine scrollwork into the intricate memory of the city. These are the inhabitants of the boundary, our necessary shadows that are being cast further from the warmth of their twins. The block gives itself completely to these and will fierce itself against the bright sneers and plastic credit blades that shave their humanity.

  Without word or agreement, without plan or direction they have begun to sleep a line. In the gutters and elbows of curbs, in the approved architectural contrivances they have threaded themselves in a necklace cleated to ring a living, dreaming wall; a perimeter fence. Their expulsion has constructed a cage that concentrates the greed in its own bitter well.

  The Stumbling Block is a night thing, that sits on the heart. It will sip from the ribs of guilt, to breathe luminous heat into flat shabby lungs elsewhere.

  Brian Catling (1990)

  Chekhov: A Sestina

  Why him? He woke up and felt anxious. He was out of sorts, out of character. If only it would go away. Ivashin loved Nadya Vishnyevskaya and was afraid of his love. When the butler told him the old lady had just gone out, but that the young lady was at home, he fumbled in his fur coat and dresscoat pocket, found his card, and said: ‘Right.’ But it was not right. Driving from his house in the morning to pay a visit, he thought he was compelled to it by the conventions of society which weighed heavily upon him. But now it was clear that he went to pay calls only because somewhere far away in the depths of his soul, as under a veil, there lay hidden a hope that he would see Nadya, his secret love. And he suddenly felt pitiful, sad, and not a little anxious. In his soul, it seemed to him, it was snowing, and everything was fading away. He was afraid to love Nadya, because he thought he was too old for her, his appearance unattractive, and did not believe that a young woman like her could love a man for his mind or spiritual character. Everything was dim, sharing, he felt, the same blank character. Still, there would rise at times in him something like hope, a glimpse of happiness, of things turning out all right. Then, just as quickly, it would pass away. And he would wonder what had come over him. Why should he, a retired councillor of state, educated, liberal-minded, a well-traveled man; why should he, in other words, be so anxious? Were there not other women with whom he could fall in love? Surely, it was always possible to fall in love. It was possible, moreover, to fall in love without acting out of character. There was absolutely no need for him to be anxious. To be in love, to have a young pretty wife and children of his own, was not a crime or a deception, but his right. Clearly, there was something wrong with him. He wished he were far away … But suddenly he hears from somewhere in the house the young officer’s spurs jingle and then die away. That instant marked the death of his timid love. And in its vanishing, he felt the seeds of a different sort of melancholy take root within him. Whatever happened now, whatever desolation might be his, it would build character. Yes, he thought, so it is only right. Yes, all is finished, and I’m glad, very glad, yes, and I’m not let down, no, nor am I in any way anxious. No, certainly not anxious. What he had to do now was to get away. But how could he make it look right? How could he have thought he was in love? How out of character! How very unlike him!

  Mark Strand (1990)

  Inflation

  I stand on the edge of the place where I am expected to become invisible. I ask if this is all there is.

  The fog lifts slightly and I walk towards an area slowly creasing into water. I look into the water and can just see a blur of grey. I do my hair, combing it carefully over the place where my scalp shines through.

  When I look up, a young ferryman is standing in the shallows. Once, I would have caught him in my arms and pressed his body into mine. I would have fingered obsessively the small curls on the nape of his neck and pretended to read his soul. Now I feel nothing but hatred for him.

  He grins mockingly and holds out his hand, making a deep bowl of the palm.

  I lie that I have no change, not even two obols. He doesn’t understand, or pretends he doesn’t. His eyes still mock me.

  When I have explained, he says he will not accept foreign coins. He mentions a three-figure sum, and demands a cheque, made out in sterling.

  And it turns out he doesn’t even go all the way to the underworld.

  Carol Rumens (1989)

  Quaker Oats

  The grain elevators have stood empty for years. They used to feed an entire nation of children. Hunched in red leatherette breakfast-nooks, fingers dreaming, children let their spoons clack on the white sides of their bowls. They stare at the carton on the table, a miniature silo with a kindly face smiling under a stiff black hat.

  They eat their oats with milk and butter and sugar. They eat their oats in their sleep, where horsedrawn carts jolt along miry roads, past cabins where other children wait, half-frozen under tattered counterpanes. The man with the black hat, a burlap sack tucked under his arm, steps down from the wagon whispering come out, don’t be afraid.

  And they come, the sick and the healthy; the red, the brown, the white; the ruddy and the sallow; the curly and the lank. They tumble from rafters and crawl out of trundles. He gives them to eat. He gives them prayers and a good start in the morning. He gives them free enterprise; he gives them the flag and PA systems and roller skates and citizenship. He gives them a tawny canoe to portage overland, through the woods, through the midwestern snow.

  Rita Dove (1989)

  from The World Doesn’t End

  My father loved the strange books of André Breton. He’d raise the wine glass and toast those far-off evenings ‘when butterflies formed a single uncut ribbon.’ Or we’d go out for a piss in the back alley and he’d say, ‘Here are some binoculars for blindfolded eyes.’ We lived in a rundown tenement that smelled of old people and their pets.

  ‘Hovering on the edge of the abyss, permeated with the perfume of the forbidden,’ we’d take turns cutting the smoked sausage on the table. ‘I love America,’ he’d tell us. We were going to make a million dollars manufacturing objects we had seen in dreams that night.

  Charles Simic (1989)

  Human Wishes

  This morning the sun rose over the garden wall and a rare blue sky leaped from east to west. Man is altogether desire, say the Upanishads. Worth anything, a blue sky, says Mr. Acker, the Shelford gardener. Not altogether. In the end. Last night on television the ethnologist and the cameraman watched with hushed wonder while the chimpanzee carefully stripped a willow branch and inserted it into the anthill. He desired red ants. When they crawled slowly up the branch, he ate them, pinched between long fingers as the zoom lens enlarged his face. Sometimes he stopped to examine one, as if he were a judge at an ant beauty contest or God puzzled suddenly by the idea of suffering. There was an empty place in the universe where that branch wasn’t and the chimp filled it, as Earlene, finding no back on an old Welsh cupboard she had bought in Saffron Walden, imagined one there and imagined both the cupboard and the imagined back against a kitchen wall in Berkeley, and went into town looking for a few boards of eighteenth-century tongue-in-groove pine to fill that empty space. I stayed home to write, or rather stayed home and stared at a blank piece of paper, waiting for her to come back, thinking tongue-in-groove, tongue-in-groove, as if language were a kind of moral cloud chamber through which the world passed and from which it emerged charged with desire. The man in the shop in Cambridge said he didn’t have any old pine, but when Earlene went back after thinking about it to
say she was sure she had seen some, the man found it. Right under his feet, which was puzzling. Mr. Acker, hearing the story, explained. You know, he said, a lot of fiddling goes on in those places. The first time you went in, the governor was there, the second time he wasn’t, so the chap sold you some scrap and he’s four quid in pocket. No doubt he’s having a good time now with his mates in the pub. Or he might have put it on the horses at Newmarket. He might parley it into a fortune.

  Robert Hass (1989)

  Burnt Hair

  One night, under the cool sheets, I dreamt of grandmother. She came to me as in a shadow play, that ancient art of the south, her tiny figure fluttering into sight across my bedsheet. When her body sailed into full view I realized she sat on a stool, hands tied behind her, mouth stuffed with a gag.

  Next, I saw the old fashioned sailing ship, the sort one sees on Lipton tea tins with three masts and a tottering deck. Her feet were tied to the foot of a mast, then knotted to the three-legged stool. Her profile was clear now, the high cheek bones, large firm mouth and beaked nose, all familiar from the photographs of my childhood. I beckoned in my dream, but she would not speak.

  Then came the fat man, slowly, as if the shadow players were unwilling. Twice as large as she was. A broad brimmed hat, the cowboy kind thrust to his head, boots that came up to his knees. A whip in his right hand. A fat cigar in his mouth. A Britisher, without a doubt. He plucked it out.

  Her arms moved up now, over the mast, still tied. By remote control, they moved up, inch by inch. I smelt the shock of singed hair, the fiery nib. I bit my tongue. I did not weep. How could I when she sat there, utterly still. She did not cringe, she did not twitch a lip, my grandmother.

  The ship moved on. Water lapped against the deck in small pointy waves. The water touched her toes. She sat there holding the fire in her armpits. Finally he seemed to tire. He leant his hulk over the deck and vomited into water. The tiny men who scurried in bearing platters of peaches and pigs, turtle doves and duck eggs, knelt at the portholes and wept. They could not untie grandmother, their wrists too frail from malnutrition. They did not have metal hidden in their pockets.

  She just sat there, my grandmother, as the ship sailed into darkness. Her arms were still lifted high. Did the moonlight cool her face? Did the ropes slip off, a cunning resolution the puppeteers sometimes allow? Was she lifted off the ship and carried in triumph? Did Gandhi greet her?

  I did not ask consoling questions in my sleep. It was the stench of burnt hair that stayed with me.

  Meena Alexander (1988)

  The Hanoi Market

  It smells of sea and earth, of things dying and newly born. Duck eggs, pig feet, mandarin oranges. Wooden bins and metal boxes of nails, screws, ratchets, balled copper wire, brass fittings, jet and helicopter gadgets, lug wrenches, bolts of silk, see-through paper, bamboo calligraphy pens, and curios hammered out of artillery shells.

  Faces painted on coconuts. Polished to a knife-edge or sealed in layers of dust and grease, cogs and flywheels await secret missions. Aphrodisiacs for dream merchants. A silent storm moves through this place. Someone’s worked sweat into the sweet loaves of bread lined up like coffins on a stone slab.

  She tosses her blonde hair back and smiles down at everyone. Is it the squid and shrimp we ate at lunch, am I seeing things? An adjacent stall blooms with peacock feathers. The T-shirt wavers like a pennant as a sluggish fan slices the humidity.

  I remember her white dress billowing up in a blast of warm air from a steel grate in New York City, reminding me of Miss Firecracker flapping like a flag from an APC antenna. Did we kill each other for this?

  I stop at a table of figurines. What was meant to tear off a leg or arm twenty years ago, now is a child’s toy I can’t stop touching.

  Maybe Marilyn thought she’d erase herself from our minds, but she’s here when the fan flutters the T-shirt silkscreened with her face. The artist used five shades of red to get her smile right.

  A door left ajar by a wedge of sunlight. Below the T-shirt, at the end of two rows of wooden bins, a chicken is tied directly across from a caged snake. Bright skin – deadly bite. I move from the chicken to the snake, caught in their hypnotic plea.

  Yusef Komunyakaa (1988)

  reading

  there were so many books. she had to separate them to avoid being overwhelmed by the excessive implications of their words. she kept hundreds in a series of boxes inside a wire cage in a warehouse. and hundreds more on the shelves of her various rooms. when she changed houses she would pack some of the books into the boxes and exchange them for others that had been hibernating. these resurrected books were precious to her for a while. they had assumed the patinas of dusty chthonic wisdoms. and thus she would let them sit on the shelves admiring them from a distance. gathering time and air. she did not want to be intimate with their insides. the atmospherics suggested by the titles were enough. sometimes she would increase the psychic proximities between herself and the books and place a pile of them on the floor next to her bed. and quite possibly she absorbed their intentions while she slept.

  if she intended travelling beyond a few hours she would occasionally remove a book from the shelves and place it in her bag. she carried ‘the poetics of space’ round india for three months and it returned to her shelves undamaged at the completion of the journey. every day of those three months she touched it and read some of the titles of its chapters to make sure it was there. and real. chapters called house and universe, nests, shells, intimate immensity, miniatures and, the significance of the hut. she had kept it in a pocket of her bag together with a coloured whistle and an acorn. she now kept this book in the darkness of her reference shelf. and she knew that one day she would have to admit to herself that this was the only book she had need of, that this was the book she would enter the pages of, that this was the book she was going to read

  joanne burns (1988)

  The First Week of Mourning

  In memory of my daughters’ mother’s mother

  Nearly home.

  When, true to the habits of half a century, she bent down by the brook where she had washed her clothes as a child and discovered, much to her surprise, that she could not scoop up even half a drop of its refreshing clarity or see the slightest sign or shadow of her reflection in the mirror-like surface of the water, then, and only then, did she recall that because her son and daughter-in-law had followed the fashion of going to Church, no one had bothered to chant a Buddhist sutra to ease her soul into the next world, much less honour her in this world by giving her a spirit tablet in the family shrine.

  As a peach petal floats through the fangs of the crescent moon, grandma almost bursts into tears. She has all but forgotten how she had just walked upon the waves of couch grass and walked upon the waves of rush flowers and walked upon the waves of the Formosa Strait and walked upon the waves of Dongting Lake and is nearly home.

  Shang Qin (1987), translated from the Chinese by Steve Bradbury

  The Dogs

  A country of mountains that are dogs, of valleys that are barks, of stones standing upright in the barking like dogs pulling at the end of their chains.

  And in the leaps, the paintings, the fury, here is the open door, here is the hall. The fire is bright, the table set, the wine shines in the carafes.

  Yves Bonnefoy (1987), translated from the French by Richard Stamelman

  from My Life

  One begins as a student but becomes a friend of clouds

  Back and backward, why, wide and wider. Such that art is inseparable from the search for reality. The continent is greater than the content. A river nets the peninsula. The garden rooster goes through the goldenrod. I watched a robin worming its way on the ridge, time on the uneven light ledge. There as in that’s their truck there. Where it rested in the weather there it rusted. As one would say, my friends, meaning no possession, and don’t harm my trees. Marigolds, nasturtiums, snapdragons, sweet William, forget-me-nots, replaced by chard, tomatoes, let
tuce, garlic, peas, beans, carrots, radishes – but marigolds. The hum hurts. Still, I felt intuitively that this which was incomprehensible was expectant, increasing, was good. The greatest thrill was to be the one to ‘tell.’ All rivers’ left banks remind me of Paris, not to see or sit upon but to hear spoken of. Cheese makes one thirsty but onions make a worse thirst. The Spanish make a little question frame. In the case, propped on a stand so as to beckon, was the hairy finger of St. Cecilia, covered with rings. The old dress is worn out, torn up, dumped. Erasures could not serve better authenticity. The years pass, years in which, I take it, events were not lacking. There are more colors in the great rose window of Chartres than in the rose. Beside a body, not a piece, of water. Serpentine is fool’s jade. It is on a dressed stone. The previousness of plants in prior color – no dream can come up to the original, which in the common daylight is voluminous. Yet he insisted that his life had been full of happy chance, that he was luck’s child. As a matter of fact, quite the obverse. After a 9-to-5 job he got to just go home. Do you have a compulsion to work and then did you have a good time. Now it is one o’clock on the dot, but that is only a coincidence and it has a bad name. Patriots drive larger cars. At the time the perpetual Latin of love kept things hidden. We might be late to the movies but always early for the kids. The women at the parents’ meeting must wear rings, for continuity. More sheep than sleep. Paul was telling me a plot which involved time travel, I asked, ‘How do they go into the future?’ and he answered, ‘What do you mean? – they wait and the future comes to them – of course!’ so the problem was going into the past. I think my interests are much broader than those of people who have been saying the same thing for eight years, or so he said. Has the baby enough teeth for an apple. Juggle, jungle, chuckle. The hummingbird, for all we know, may be singing all day long. We had been in France where every word really was a bird, a thing singing. I laugh as if my pots were clean. The apple in the pie is the pie. An extremely pleasant and often comic satisfaction comes from conjunction, the fit, say, of comprehension in a reader’s mind to content in a writer’s work. But not bitter.