2. Yellow
There was a boy who drowned in the river, near the grove of thirty-two bois d’arc trees. The light of the moon lay like a path on the water, and a glitter of low brilliance shone in it. The boy looked at it and was enchanted. He began to sing a song that he had never heard before; only then, once, did he hear it in his heart, and it was borne like a cloud of down upon his voice. His voice entered into the bright track of the moon, and he followed after it. For a time he made his way along the path of the moon, singing. He paddled with his arms and legs and felt his body rocking down into the swirling water. His vision ran along the path of light and reached across the wide night and took hold of the moon. And across the river, where the path led into the shadows of the bank, a black dog emerged from the river, shivering and shaking the water from its hair. All night it stood in the waves of grass and howled the full moon down.
3. Brown
On the night before a flood, the terrapins move to high ground. How is it that they know? Once there was a boy who took up a terrapin in his hands and looked at it for a long time, as hard as he could look. He succeeded in memorizing the terrapin’s face, but he failed to see how it was that the terrapin knew anything at all.
4. Red
There was a man who had got possession of a powerful medicine. And by means of this medicine he made a woman out of sumac leaves and lived with her for a time. Her eyes flashed, and her skin shone like pipestone. But the man abused her, and so his medicine failed. The woman was caught up in a whirlwind and blown apart. Then nothing was left of her but a thousand withered leaves scattered in the plain.
5. Green
A young girl awoke one night and looked out into the moonlit meadow. There appeared to be a tree; but it was only an appearance; there was a shape made of smoke; but it was only an appearance; there was a tree.
6. Blue
One night there appeared a child in the camp. No one had ever seen it before. It was not bad-looking, and it spoke a language that was pleasant to hear, though none could understand it. The wonderful thing was that the child was perfectly unafraid, as if it were at home among its own people. The child got on well enough, but the next morning it was gone, as suddenly as it had appeared. Everyone was troubled. But then it came to be understood that the child never was, and everyone felt better. ‘After all,’ said an old man, ‘How can we believe in the child? It gave us not one word of sense to hold on to. What we saw, if indeed we saw anything at all, must have been a dog from a neighboring camp, or a bear that wandered down from the high country.’
7. Purple
There was a man who killed a buffalo bull to no purpose, only he wanted its blood on his hands. It was a great, old, noble beast, and it was a long time blowing its life away. On the edge of the night the people gathered themselves up in their grief and shame. Away in the west they could see the hump and the spine of the huge beast which lay dying along the edge of the world. They could see its bright blood run into the sky, where it dried, darkening, and was at last flecked with flakes of light.
8. Black
There was a woman whose hair was long and heavy and black and beautiful. She drew it about her like a shawl and so divided herself from the world that not even Age could find her. Now and then she steals into the men’s societies and fits her voice into their holiest songs. And always, just there, is a shadow which the firelight cannot cleave.
N. Scott Momaday (1976)
Portrait of A. E. (An Artful Fairy Tale)
As if the house could not have been preserved in this spot at any time: not the basement, not the basement windows, not the windows looking out onto the garden.
As if every war had intentionally focused on precisely this spot, on tearing out the stairs.
As if every storm too, every stroke of lightning had struck the walls, every downpour brought the dark down on the helpless.
As if precisely here a child’s inconsolable sobs had been able to melt stones, as if here everything had happened that others were able to fend off.
As if here the green of the bushes cut like fire through the soft flowing air.
As if this spot could teach us where houses have been preserved one could make friends with and visit.
As if the house here had not been preserved so that foundations could be laid for a life.
Elke Erb (1976), translated from the German by Rosmarie Waldrop
Chile
The patrol came down without having found anything.
‘The third time they’ve been,’ said the woman, ‘and found nothing.’
‘Cheerio, kid,’ the lieutenant said to the child. ‘We won’t be here again.’
‘Why, did you find daddy in the attic?’ the child asked.
‘We did,’ said the lieutenant and went back into the house and brought the man down and shot him dead in the yard in front of the child and the woman.
Pupils stare like great worlds: the Earth, in its green dress, tells lies about sea and spring, surrounded by the searing stars.
Ottó Orbán (1976), translated from the Hungarian by Edwin Morgan
Scissors
This thing lying on the desk is now being seen by my eyes. I could pick it up at this moment. I could cut out a human figure with it. I might even cut off all my hair. Though it’s understood that murder is out of the question.
Yet this thing also keeps getting rustier, blunter and older. It’s still useful but it’ll be thrown away before long. Although I have no way of knowing whether it’s made of ore from Chile or whether Krupp’s fingers have touched it, it’s not hard to imagine that it will finally return to its indeterminate destiny, moving away from its human formality back to its original state. This thing here on the desk is at this moment talking about such a time, not to anyone in particular but coldly, silently, as if it were not doing that. People manufactured this for practical purposes and yet it has inevitably come to exist here in this way before and apart from any practical purpose it might have. It’s something which could be variously named – not just ‘scissors.’ It already has countless other names. Habit alone keeps me from using the other names. Or is it out of self-defence?
Because this thing, existing like this, has the power to extract words from me so that I go on being unreeled in this string of words and am always on the dangerous verge of being reduced to a far more thinner and feebler existence than that of the scissors.
Shuntarō Tanikawa (1975), translated from the Japanese by William I. Elliott and Kazuo Kawamura
A Caterpillar
Lifting my coffee cup, I notice a caterpillar crawling over my sheet of ten-cent airmail stamps. The head is black as a Chinese box. Nine soft accordions follow it around, with a waving motion like a flabby mountain. Skinny brushes used to clean pop bottles rise from some of its shoulders. As I pick up the sheet of stamps, the caterpillar advances around and around the edge, and I see his feet: three pairs under the head, four spongelike pairs under the middle body, and two final pairs at the tip, pink as a puppy’s hind legs. As he walks, he rears, six pairs of legs off the stamp, waving around the air! One of the sponge pairs, and the last two tail pairs, the reserve feet, hold on anxiously. It is the first of September. The leaf shadows are less ferocious on the notebook cover. A man accepts his failures more easily – or perhaps summer’s insanity is gone? A man notices ordinary earth, scorned in July, with affection, as he settles down to his daily work, to use stamps.
Robert Bly (1975)
Cloistered
Light was calloused in the leaded panes of the college chapel and shafted into the terrazzo rink of the sanctuary. The duty priest tested his diction against pillar and plaster, we tested our elbows on the hard bevel of the benches or split the gold-barred thickness of our missals.
I could make a book of hours of those six years, a Flemish calendar of rite and pastime set on a walled hill. Look: there is a hillside cemetery behind us and across the river the plough going in a field and in between, the gated town. Here,
an obedient clerk kissing a bishop’s ring, here a frieze of seasonal games, and here the assiduous illuminator himself, bowed to his desk in a corner.
In the study hall my hand was cold as a scribe’s in winter. The supervisor rustled past, sibilant, vapouring into his breviary, his welted brogues unexpectedly secular under the soutane. Now I bisected the line AB, now found my foothold in a main verb in Livy. From my dormer after lights out I revised the constellations and in the morning broke the ice on an enamelled water-jug with exhilarated self-regard.
Seamus Heaney (1975)
Ape
You haven’t finished your ape, said mother to father, who had monkey hair and blood on his whiskers.
I’ve had enough monkey, cried father.
You didn’t eat the hands, and I went to all the trouble to make onion rings for its fingers, said mother.
I’ll just nibble on its forehead, and then I’ve had enough, said father.
I stuffed its nose with garlic, just like you like it, said mother.
Why don’t you have the butcher cut these apes up? You lay the whole thing on the table every night; the same fractured skull, the same singed fur; like someone who died horribly. These aren’t dinners, these are post-mortem dissections.
Try a piece of its gum, I’ve stuffed its mouth with bread, said mother.
Ugh, it looks like a mouth full of vomit. How can I bite into its cheek with bread spilling out of its mouth? cried father.
Break one of the ears off, they’re so crispy, said mother.
I wish to hell you’d put underpants on these apes; even a jockstrap, screamed father.
Father, how dare you insinuate that I see the ape as anything more than simple meat, screamed mother.
Well what’s with this ribbon tied in a bow on its privates? screamed father.
Are you saying that I am in love with this vicious creature? That I would submit my female opening to this brute? That after we had love on the kitchen floor I would put him in the oven, after breaking his head with a frying pan; and then serve him to my husband, that my husband might eat the evidence of my infidelity …?
I’m just saying that I’m damn sick of ape every night, cried father.
Russel Edson (1973)
from The Wild Rose
John Patrick 1904–1971
I
Nothing to say for himself. After his death I learned what little there is: born Buncrana Inishowen Donegal, 1904; name of father Samuel; mother’s name Mary McGrory. She died in his birth. He was sent to England, to be raised by an uncle, a farmer, who didn’t want him. He worked. If he had any schooling it didn’t show. He wrote his name in a child’s scrawl, claimed poor eyesight to avoid reading, refused eyeglasses. My mother said when she met him he was carrying a suitcase with two shirts in it. Nothing else. He said he was born in Northumberland, to have come from there, that his father’s name was William. Maybe he knew, or had never been told. Or maybe the clerks merely tied up loose ends and matched two sets of papers to give me a life not his. He never would talk of it. She remembered he would stare at a knife and fork, not knowing which hand to take them in, when he came into the house he said goodnight in greeting. She married him, his silence and his violence and his gentleness. We went from farm to farm, a hired man living in a tied house, the furniture piled in a cattle truck. His fingers were frostbitten, white and stiff, I have spoken of them. Quarrelsome, proud and private, he could agree with no one. Locked out of one farm, he nailed every door and window to its jamb. Sacked from another, he fired the stackyard. He had no friends, confided in no one, his rhythm long quietness broken by bursts of sustained anger. It was his solitude I loved; his stern face coming in from the frost, a stolen chicken under his coat. And his shy grin, his slow walk through the fields, the dog circling him. He did nothing but work, so long as there was light to do it by, till the light went out of him, whatever it meant.
VII
I laboured to write this for him. The stone carries his name and dates and the middle name that may not be his, and a wild rose cut into its corner. There is another space, blank, waiting for the mallet.
The chalk folds around him, waits for the sea’s coming. The silence has gone into itself. If the grave is that deep it is deeper.
I walk away from it, valuing my life, the woman I married, the children she brought out of herself crying. Months later I discovered I was happy that my life meant it could not be given up. Whatever these are, whether they are poems or not, they are to celebrate, the drip of water building a tower of itself from the minerals it has gathered.
The dead lie with bitterness in their mouths. Something of them comes back, as he does, it does not disturb me. They want to go on, or to return to settle what was not done here; it is what holds them back, this wanting. I am happy that he chooses sometimes to be with me. I am his son; my house is his and I welcome him, wondering, since he was a private man who preferred silence and kept from his own kind, how he gets on with the other dead. Knowing we have made peace, he and I, I want him to make peace with them. They tower below us, like wheat.
Ken Smith (1973)
Chimes of Silence
At first there is a peep-hole on the living.
It sneaks into the yard of lunatics, lifers, violent and violated nerves, cripples, tuberculars, victims of power sadism safely hidden from questions. A little square hole cut in the door, enough for a gaoler’s fist to pass through and manipulate the bolt from either side. Enough also for me to – casually, oh so casually – steal a quick look at the rare flash of a hand, a face, a gesture; more often a blur of khaki, the square planted rear of the guard on the other side.
Until one day, a noise of hammering. All morning an assault of blows multiplied and magnified by the unique echoing powers of my crypt. (When it thunders, my skull is the anvil of gods.) By noon that breach is sealed. Only the sky is now open, a sky the size of a napkin trapped by tall spikes and broken bottles, but a sky. Vultures perch on a roof just visible from another yard. And crows. Egrets overfly my crypt and bats swarm at sunset. Albino bats, sickly pale, emitting radio pips to prowl the echo chamber. But the world is dead, suddenly. For an eternity after ceasing the hammers sustain their vehemence. Even the sky retracts, dead.
Buried alive? No. Only something men read of. Buoys and landmarks vanish. Slowly, remorselessly, reality dissolves and certitude betrays the mind.
Days weeks months, then as suddenly as that first death, a new sound, a procession. Feet approach, dragging to the clank of chains. And now another breach that has long remained indifferent, blank, a floodhole cut in the base of the wall, this emptiness slowly, gracelessly, begins to frame manacled feet. Nothing has ever passed so close, so ponderously across the floodhole of the Wailing Wall. (I named it that, because it overlooks the yard where a voice cried out in agony all of one night and died at dawn, unattended. It is the yard from which hymns and prayers rise with a constancy matched only by the vigil of crows and vultures.) And now, feet. Bare except for two pairs of boots which consciously walk deadweight to match the pace of manacles on the others. Towards noon the same procession passes the other way. Some days later the proession again goes by and I count. Eleven. The third day of this procession wakes into the longest dawn that ever was born and died of silence, a silence replete and awesome. My counting stops brusquely at six. No more. In that instant the ritual is laid bare, the silence, the furtive conspiracy of dawn, the muffled secrets hammer louder than manacles in my head, all all is bared in one paralysing understanding. Five men are walking the other way, five men walking even more slowly, wearily, with the weight of the world on each foot, on each step towards eternity. I hear them pause at every scrap of life, at every beat of the silence, at every mote in the sun, those five for whom the world is about to die.
Sounds. Sounds acquire a fourth dimension in a living crypt. A definition which, as in the case of thunder becomes physically unbearable. In the case of the awaited but unheard, psychically punishing. Pips fro
m albino bats pock the babble of evensong – moslem and christian, pagan and unclassifiable. My crypt they turn into a cauldron, an inverted bell of faiths whose sonorities are gathered, stirred, skimmed, sieved in the warp and weft of sooty mildew on walls, of green velvet fungus woven by the rain’s cunning fingers. From beyond the Wall of Mists the perverse piety of women, that inhuman patience to which they are born drifts across to lash the anguish from the Wall of Purgatory. A clap of wings – a white-and-ochre bolt, a wood-pigeon diving and crossing, a restless shuttle threading sun-patches through this darkest of looms. Beyond and above the outside wall, a rustle of leaves – a boy’s face! A guileless hunter unmasks, in innocence – an evil labyrinth. I shall know his voice when children’s songs invade the cauldron of sounds at twilight, this pulse intrusion in the home of death.
The sun is rising behind him. His head dissolves in the pool, a shuttle sinking in a fiery loom.
Wole Soyinka (1972)
from Mercian Hymns
I
King of the perennial holly-groves, the riven sandstone: overlord of the M5: architect of the historic rampart and ditch, the citadel at Tamworth, the summer hermitage in Holy Cross: guardian of the Welsh Bridge and the Iron Bridge: contractor to the desirable new estates: saltmaster: moneychanger: commissioner for oaths: martyrologist: the friend of Charlemagne.
‘I liked that,’ said Offa, ‘sing it again.’
II
A pet-name, a common name. Best-selling brand, curt graffito. A laugh; a cough. A syndicate. A specious gift. Scoffed-at horned phonograph.
The starting-cry of a race. A name to conjure with.
III
On the morning of the crowning we chorused our remission from school. It was like Easter: hankies and gift-mugs approved by his foreign gaze, the village-lintels curlered with paper flags.
The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem Page 16