The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem

by Jeremy Noel-Tod

  The jogging was consistently idiotic, it induced a feeling of complete security. I gave up my complicated life on the spot; and lay screwed up like an old handkerchief screwed up in a pocket, suspended in time, ready to go to the ends of the earth. O trans-Siberian railways! Balloons! Astronauts!

  Rosemary Tonks (1967)

  Strayed Crab

  This is not my home. How did I get so far from water? It must be over that way somewhere.

  I am the color of wine, of tinta. The inside of my powerful right claw is saffron-yellow. See, I see it now; I wave it like a flag. I am dapper and elegant; I move with great precision, cleverly managing all my smaller yellow claws. I believe in the oblique, the indirect approach, and I keep my feelings to myself.

  But on this strange, smooth surface I am making too much noise. I wasn’t meant for this. If I maneuver a bit and keep a sharp lookout, I shall find my pool again. Watch out for my right claw, all passersby! This place is too hard. The rain has stopped, and it is damp, but still not wet enough to please me.

  My eyes are good, though small; my shell is tough and tight. In my own pool are many small gray fish. I see right through them. Only their large eyes are opaque, and twitch at me. They are hard to catch but I, I catch them quickly in my arms and eat them up.

  What is that big soft monster, like a yellow cloud, stifling and warm? What is it doing? It pats my back. Out, claw. There, I have frightened it away. It’s sitting down, pretending nothing’s happened. I’ll skirt it. It’s still pretending not to see me. Out of my way, O monster. I own a pool, all the little fish that swim in it, and all the skittering waterbugs that smell like rotten apples.

  Cheer up, O grievous snail. I tap your shell, encouragingly, not that you will ever know about it.

  And I want nothing to do with you, either, sulking toad. Imagine, at least four times my size and yet so vulnerable … I could open your belly with my claw. You glare and bulge, a watchdog near my pool; you make a loud and hollow noise. I do not care for such stupidity. I admire compression, lightness, and agility, all rare in this loose world.

  Elizabeth Bishop (1967)

  The Flag

  My flag is blue and sports a fish rampant, locked in and let loose by two bracelets. In winter, when the wind blows hard and there’s no one about in these out-of-the-way places, I like to hear the flag crack like a whip with the fish swimming in the sky as if it were alive.

  And why this fish, I’m asked. Is it mystical? Yes, I say, it is the ichthyous symbol, the prechristic, the luminocratic, the friddled, the true, the fried, the fried fish.

  – And nothing else?

  – Nothing else.

  But in high winter, the flag thrashes up there with its fish in the air, trembling with cold, wind and sky.

  Pablo Neruda (1966), translated from the Spanish by Nathaniel Tarn

  Vocabulary

  ‘La Pologne? La Pologne? Isn’t it terribly cold there?’ she asked, and then sighed with relief. So many countries have been turning up lately that the safest thing to talk about is climate.

  ‘Madame,’ I want to reply, ‘my people’s poets do all their writing in mittens. I don’t mean to imply that they never remove them; they do, indeed, if the moon is warm enough. In stanzas composed of raucous whooping, for only such can drown the windstorms’ constant roar, they glorify the simple lives of our walrus herders. Our Classicists engrave their odes with inky icicles on trampled snowdrifts. The rest, our Decadents, bewail their fate with snowflakes instead of tears. He who wishes to drown himself must have an ax at hand to cut the ice. Oh, madame, dearest madame.’

  That’s what I mean to say. But I’ve forgotten the word for walrus in French. And I’m not sure of icicle and ax.

  ‘La Pologne? La Pologne? Isn’t it terribly cold there?’

  ‘Pas du tout,’ I answer icily.

  Wisława Szymborska (1962), translated from the Polish by Stansisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh

  Catherine of Siena

  Bridges. Ways over and ways to wait. Place for a stance or a stillness. Places, too, for violence. Bridges are blown and a war starts.

  And in the water you can see the fish – if you watch carefully, if you side-step your own shadow, if you gaze deeper than self-love or arrogance.

  Many have paused here. Have noted the faint sky reflected, the full moon falling, it seems, in the water. Have fallen in love with the dark.

  For her, they were ways merely. Bridges meant building, meant the creak of planks, the delicate balance where wood is articulate, where men move as one, where the water is conquered.

  Where prayer is most painful, she sought for an image. Others learnt light, air, steps, birds (the dove as a pretext or omen). All insubstantial for her. She needed the passion, the building, something to cleave – and connect.

  Not standing there, letting the night drown in the water, watching the dear shadows that hold off the mountain. For her, the poise before the moment’s abandon, all the reprisals of pain.

  Pope, people, kings, confessors came to her. Proud professions passed over her bridges. Only Siena – round hill-city, seething with feud and friendship – was the safe place, solid ground, sweet summit where winds meet. Only here were bridges redundant.

  Can light heal? Can the fountain surrender? Dare the fisherman pause? Her bridges were built for a journey. The unconcerned waters flowed on.

  Elizabeth Jennings (1961)

  from City

  Walking through the suburb at night, as I pass the dentist’s house I hear a clock chime a quarter, a desolate brassy sound. I know where it stands, on the mantelpiece in the still surgery. The chime falls back into the house, and beyond it, without end. Peace.

  I sense the simple nakedness of these tiers of sleeping men and women beneath whose windows I pass. I imagine it in its own setting, a mean bathroom in a house no longer new, a bathroom with plank panelling, painted a peculiar shade of green by an amateur, and badly preserved. It is full of steam, so much as to obscure the yellow light and hide the high, patched ceiling. In this dream, standing quiet, the private image of the householder or his wife, damp and clean.

  I see this as it might be floating in the dark, as if the twinkling point of a distant street-lamp had blown in closer, swelling and softening to a foggy oval. I can call up a series of such glimpses that need have no end, for they are all the bodies of strangers. Some are deformed or diseased, some are ashamed, but the peace of humility and weakness is there in them all.

  I have often felt myself to be vicious, in living so much by the eye, yet among so many people. I can be afraid that the egg of light through which I see these bodies might present itself as a keyhole. Yet I can find no sadism in the way I see them now. They are warmfleshed, yet their shapes have the minuscule, remote morality of some mediaeval woodcut of the Expulsion: an eternally startled Adam, a permanently bemused Eve. I see them as homunculi, moving privately each in a softly lit fruit in a nocturnal tree. I can consider without scorn or envy the well-found bedrooms I pass, walnut and rose-pink, altars of tidy, dark-haired women, bare-backed, wifely. Even in these I can see order.

  I come quite often now upon a sort of ecstasy, a rag of light blowing among the things I know, making me feel I am not the one for whom it was intended, that I have inadvertently been looking through another’s eyes and have seen what I cannot receive.

  I want to believe I live in a single world. That is why I am keeping my eyes at home while I can. The light keeps on separating the world like a table knife: it sweeps across what I see and suggests what I do not. The imaginary comes to me with as much force as the real, the remembered with as much force as the immediate. The countries on the map divide and pile up like ice-floes: what is strange is that I feel no stress, no grating discomfort among the confusion, no loss; only a belief that I should not be here. I see the iron fences and the shallow ditches of the countryside the mild wind has travelled over. I cannot enter that countryside; nor can I escape it. I cannot join togethe
r the mild wind and the shallow ditches, I cannot lay the light across the world and then watch it slide away. Each thought is at once translucent and icily capricious. A polytheism without gods.

  Roy Fisher (1961)

  Borges and I

  The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things. Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the outskirts to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

  I do not know which of us has written this page.

  Jorge Luis Borges (1960), translated from the Spanish by James E. Irby

  from Letters to James Alexander

  Dear James

  It is absolutely clear and absolutely sunny as if neither a cloud nor a moon had ever been invented. I am lying here on the grass of the University of California, a slave state but one which today seems peculiarly beneficent. I have not had a letter from you in weeks.

  I read them all (your letters and mine) to the poets assembled for the occasion last Wednesday. Ebbe was annoyed since he thought that letters should remain letters (unless they were essays) and poems poems (a black butterfly just flew past my leg) and that the universe of the personal and the impersonal should be kept in order. George Stanley thought that I was robbing Jim to pay James. They sounded beautiful all of them.

  Things cannot die in such a spring (unless the old men of the world commit suicide (our suicide) over the question of whether East Germans be called East Germans in diplomatic notes) and every leaf and flower of this red-hot February asks me to remember this. Though it is on the other side of poetry, spring, thank whatever created both of them, is spring. And I am not sure on a day like this that the living and dying world does not have something analogous to poetry in it. That every flower and every leaf (properly read) is not a James as well as a Jim.

  Things cannot die in such a spring and yet your silence (for the spring itself proclaims that there are such things as clouds and moons) frightens me when I close my eyes or begin to write a poem.

  I wish you were with me now on this grass and could be with me like the leaves and the flowers and the grass a part of this spring. Jim and James.

  Love,

  Jack

  Jack Spicer (1959)

  Hermes, Dog and Star

  Hermes is going along in the world. He meets a dog.

  – I’m a god – Hermes introduces himself politely.

  The dog sniffs his feet.

  – I feel lonely. People betray the gods. But mortal animals without self-consciousness, that’s what we want. In the evening after traveling all day we’ll sit down under an oak. Then I’ll tell you I feel old and want to die. It’ll be a lie necessary to get you to lick my hands.

  Sure – the dog replies casually – I’ll lick your hands. They’re cold and they smell strange.

  They go along and after a while they meet a star.

  I’m Hermes – the god says – and produces one of his most handsome faces. Would you by any chance feel like coming with us to the end of the world? I’ll try to work it so that it’s scary there and you have to lean your head on my arm.

  OK – says the star in a glassy voice. I don’t care where I go. But your saying the end of the world is pure naïveté. Sadly, there is no end of the world.

  They go along. The dog, Hermes, and the star. Holding hands. Hermes thinks to himself: the next time he goes out looking for friends, he won’t be so sincere.

  Zbigniew Herbert (1957), translated from the Polish by Annette Valles

  Where the Tennis Court Was …

  Where the tennis court once was, enclosed by the small rectangle down by the railroad tracks where the wild pines grow, the couch-weed now runs matted over the ground, and the rabbits scratch in the tall grass in those hours when it is safe to come out.

  One day here two sisters came to play, two white butterflies, in the early hours of the afternoon. Toward the east the view was (and still is) open – and the damp rocks of the Corone still ripen the strong grapes for the ‘sciacchetra’. It is curious to think that each of us has a country like this one, even if altogether different, which must always remain his landscape, unchanging; it is curious that the physical order of things is so slow to filter down into us, and then so impossible to drain back out. But what of the rest? Actually, to ask the how and why of the interrupted game is like asking the how and why of that scarf of vapor rising from the loaded cargo ship anchored down there at the docks of Palmaria. Soon they will light, in the gulf, the first lamps.

  Around, as far as the eye can see, the iniquity of objects persists, intangibly. The grotto encrusted with shells should be unchanged in the dense and heavy-planted garden under the tennis court; but the fanatical uncle will come no more with his tripod camera and magnesium lamp to photograph the single flower, unrepeatable, risen from the spiny cactus, and predestined to live only the shortest of lives. Even the villas of the South Americans seem deserted. And there haven’t always been the heirs and heiresses ready to squander their sumptuously shoddy goods that came always side-by-side with the rattle of pesos and milreis. Or maybe the sarabande of the newly arrived tells us of passings on to other regions: surely we here are perfectly sheltered and out of the line of fire. It is almost as though life could not be ignited here except by lightning; as though it feeds only on such inert things as it can safely accumulate; as though it quickly cankers in such deserted zones.

  ‘Del salon en angulo oscuro – silenciosa y cubierta de polvo – veiase el arpa …’ Oh, yes, the museum would be impressive if one were able to uncover this ex-paradise of Victoriana. And no one was ever seen again on the seashell-inlayed terrace, supported by the giant Neptune (now scraped clean) after the Lion of Callao lost the election, and died; but there, by the outrageous bay window, frescoed in pears, apples and the serpents of the earthly paradise, the good-hearted Señora Paquita thought, in vain, to carry out her serene old age, comforted by her wily needles and the smile of posterity. But one day the husbands of the daughters arrived (Brazilian sons-in-law), and, the mask having been ripped away, carried these good things off. Of the duenna, and the others, not a word more was ever heard – one of the descendants came back later and performed miracles, it is said. By then, however, it was, more or less, the time of the Tripolitan hymns. And these objects, these houses, stayed inside the living circle so long as it lasted. For few felt from the start that the cold was actually coming; and among these, perhaps, was my father who, even during the hottest days of August, supper out on the terrace over (carried on amidst moths and more persistent insects), and after having thrown a wool shawl aro
und his shoulders, would repeat, always in French for who knows what reason, ‘il fait bien froid, bien froid’; then he would go off immediately into his room and lie down on the bed and smoke his 7 centime Cavour.

  Eugenio Montale (1956), translated from the Italian by Charles Wright

  A Supermarket in California

  What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.

  In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!

  What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes! – and you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

  I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.

  I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?

  I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.

  We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

  Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?