The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem

by Jeremy Noel-Tod

(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.)

  Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we’ll both be lonely.

  Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?

  Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

  Berkeley, 1955

  Allen Ginsberg (1956)

  Clock

  In the warm air of the ceiling the footlights of dreams turn on.

  The white walls have curved. The burdened chest breathes confused words. In the mirror, the wind from the south spins, carrying leaves and feathers. The window is blocked. The heart is almost extinguished among the already cold ashes of the moon – the hands are without shelter – as all the trees lying down. In the wind from the desert the needles bend and my hour is past.

  Pierre Reverdy (1955), translated from the French by Lydia Davis

  Meditations in an Emergency

  Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French?

  Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there’ll be nothing left with which to venture forth.

  Why should I share you? Why don’t you get rid of someone else for a change?

  I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.

  Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don’t I? I’m just like a pile of leaves.

  However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes – I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they’re missing? Uh huh.

  My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up. It makes me restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them still. If only I had grey, green, black, brown, yellow eyes; I would stay at home and do something. It’s not that I am curious. On the contrary, I am bored but it’s my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the earth. And lately, so great has their anxiety become, I can spare myself little sleep.

  Now there is only one man I love to kiss when he is unshaven. Heterosexuality! you are inexorably approaching. (How discourage her?)

  St. Serapion, I wrap myself in the robes of your whiteness which is like midnight in Dostoevsky. How am I to become a legend, my dear? I’ve tried love, but that hides you in the bosom of another and I am always springing forth from it like the lotus – the ecstasy of always bursting forth! (but one must not be distracted by it!) or like a hyacinth, ‘to keep the filth of life away,’ yes, there, even in the heart, where the filth is pumped in and slanders and pollutes and determines. I will my will, though I may become famous for a mysterious vacancy in that department, that greenhouse.

  Destroy yourself, if you don’t know!

  It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you’ve set. It’s like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.

  ‘Fanny Brown is run away – scampered off with a Cornet of Horse; I do love that little Minx, & hope She may be happy, tho’ She has vexed me by this Exploit a little too. – Poor silly Cecchina! or F:B: as we used to call her. – I wish She had a good Whipping and 10,000 pounds.’ – Mrs. Thrale.

  I’ve got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I’ll be back, I’ll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don’t want me to go where you go, so I go where you don’t want me to. It’s only afternoon, there’s a lot ahead. There won’t be any mail downstairs. Turning, I spit in the lock and the knob turns.

  Frank O’Hara (1954)

  Love Letter to King Tutankhamun

  Young King Tutankhamun:

  Yesterday afternoon in the museum I saw a small ivory column painted blue, pink and yellow.

  For that one simple column, which is utterly useless and meaningless to our modern lives, for that simple little column of ivory painted by your tender hands – like autumn leaves – I would have given the ten most beautiful years of my life, ten years of love and faith, each year equally useless and meaningless.

  Next to the small column I also saw, young Tutankhamun, yesterday afternoon I also saw – it was one of those clear afternoons of your beloved Egypt – I also saw your heart enclosed in a golden chest.

  For that small heart of dust, for that small heart kept in a gold, enamel box, I would have given my young, warm, and still pure heart.

  Because yesterday afternoon, my King full of Death, my heart beat full of life for you, and my life embraced your death and seemed to melt into it.

  The hard death that sticks to your bones melted under the heat of my breath and the blood of my dream, and from so much mixing of love and death I’m still intoxicated from so much dying and loving.

  Yesterday afternoon, an Egyptian afternoon speckled with white ibises, I loved your impossible eyes through the glass.

  And in some other distant Egyptian afternoon not unlike this one – the light broken up by birds – your eyes were immense, two long slits stretching to your trembling temples.

  A long time ago on an afternoon like this one your eyes lay down on the earth, and they opened on it like your country’s two mysterious lotuses.

  They were crimson eyes refreshed by twilights and high rivers in the month of September.

  Your eyes were the owners of a kingdom that boasted cities in full bloom, giant stones that had already been there for millions of years, lands sown to the horizon, armies that conquered territories extending beyond the sandy wastelands of the Nubian desert, and those renowned archers and intrepid charioteers who have remained in profile forever, as still as hieroglyphics and monoliths.

  Everything fit in your eyes, tender, most powerful King. Everything was destined for you before you had time to gaze on it. And you certainly had no time.

  Now your eyes are shut and there is a gray dust on your eyelids. They have nothing now but this gray dust, this ash of long-consumed dreams, and now, between your eyes and mine, there is an impenetrable glass.

  For those eyes of yours, which I couldn’t half-open with my kisses, I would give my own two eyes to whoever wants them, my own two eyes, so avid for landscapes, and like two thieves that steal from your sky, like masters of the world’s sun.

  I would give away my living eyes just to feel your gaze come to me through three thousand nine hundred years, to feel it upon me, to feel it come, vaguely terrifying, bearing the pale halo of Isis.

  Young King Tutankhamun, dead at nineteen years of age, let me tell you these absurd words that perhaps no one ever told you, let me tell them to you in the solitude of my hotel room, in the frigidity of walls shared with strangers, walls colder than those of the tomb you didn’t want to share with anyone.

  I tell them to you, adolescent King, you who were left in the stillness of your youthful profile, left in your crystalline grace, left in the gesture that prohibited the sacrifice of innocent doves in the temple of the terrible Ammon-Ra.

  This is how I will go on seeing you when I am faraway, standing tall before suspicious priests and circled by a flurry of white wings taking flight.

  I will have nothing of you, nothing but this dream, because everything that is yo
u is now reserved, prohibited, and infinitely impossible. For hundreds of years your gods held a vigil for you, hanging to the last hair on your head.

  I think your hair must have been straight like the rain that falls in the night. For your hair and your doves and your nineteen years so close to death, I would have been what I will never be: a fragment of love.

  But you didn’t wait for me. You walked along the edge of a crescent moon. You left me and went to the kingdom of the dead the way a child goes to a park, followed by your shimmering gazelles and your ivory carriage full of toys that still entertained you.

  If the crowds of sensible people wouldn’t have become indignant, I would have kissed your toys one by one, your heavy gold and silver toys, your strange exotic toys that children of today, who box and play soccer, would never know how to use.

  If the crowds of sensible people wouldn’t have become scandalized, I would have taken you out of your sarcophagus, which itself was inside three wooden sarcophagi, which were themselves inside a great granite sarcophagus. I would have lifted you out of the sinister depths, the sinister depths in which you grow more dead, more dead before my emboldened heart, which beats for you alone. For you alone, Sweetest of All Kings, my heart beats on this clear Egyptian afternoon on the Nile’s luminous arm!

  If the crowds of sensible people wouldn’t have become furious, I would have taken you out of your five different sarcophagi, I would have loosed you from the bindings that press too heavily on your indelible body and I would have gently wrapped you in my silk shawl.

  I would have held you to my chest like a sick little boy and I would have sung to you the most beautiful, the most tender, of my tropical songs. I would have sung to you, sweet King, the shortest of all my poems.

  Dulce María Loynaz (1953), translated from the Spanish by James O’Connor

  The Clerk’s Vision

  And to fill all these white pages that are left for me with the same monotonous question: at what hour do the hours end? And the anterooms, the memorials, the intrigues, the negotiations with the Janitor, the Rotating Chairman, the Secretary, the Associate, the Delegate. To glimpse the Influential from afar and to send my card each year to remind – who? – that in some corner, devoted, steady, plodding, although not very sure of my existence, I too await the coming of my hour, I too exist. No. I quit.

  Yes, I know, I could settle down in an idea, in a custom, in an obsession. Or stretch out on the coals of a pain or some hope and wait there, not making much noise. Of course it’s not so bad: I eat, drink, sleep, make love, observe the marked holidays and go to the beach in summer. People like me and I like them. I take my condition lightly: sickness, insomnia, nightmares, social gatherings, the idea of death, the little worm that burrows into the heart or the liver (the little worm that leaves its eggs in the brain and at night pierces the deepest sleep), the future at the expense of today – the today that never comes on time, that always loses its bets. No. I renounce my ration card, my I.D., my birth certificate, voter’s registration, passport, code number, countersign, credentials, safe conduct pass, insignia, tattoo, brand.

  The world stretches out before me, the vast world of the big, the little, and the medium. Universe of kings and presidents and jailors, of mandarins and pariahs and liberators and liberated, of judges and witnesses and the condemned: stars of the first, second, third and nth magnitudes, planets, comets, bodies errant and eccentric or routine and domesticated by the laws of gravity, the subtle laws of falling, all keeping step, all turning slowly or rapidly around a void. Where they claim the central sun lies, the solar being, the hot beam made out of every human gaze, there is nothing but a hole and less than a hole: the eye of a dead fish, the giddy cavity of the eye that falls into itself and looks at itself without seeing. There is nothing with which to fill the hollow center of the whirlwind. The springs are smashed, the foundations collapsed, the visible or invisible bonds that joined one star to another, one body to another, one man to another, are nothing but a tangle of wires and thorns, a jungle of claws and teeth that twist us and chew us and spit us out and chew us again. No one hangs himself by the rope of a physical law. The equations fall tirelessly into themselves.

  And in regard to the present matter, if the present matters: I do not belong to the masters. I don’t wash my hands of it, but I am not a judge, nor a witness for the prosecution, nor an executioner. I do not torture, interrogate, or suffer interrogation. I do not loudly plead for leniency, nor wish to save myself or anyone else. And for all that I don’t do and for all that they do to us, I neither ask forgiveness nor forgive. Their piety is as abject as their justice. Am I innocent? I’m guilty. Am I guilty? I’m innocent. (I’m innocent when I’m guilty, guilty when I’m innocent. I’m guilty when … but that is another song. Another song? It’s all the same song.) Guilty innocent, innocent guilty, the fact is I quit.

  I remember my loves, my conversation, my friendships. I remember it all, see it all, see them all. With melancholy, but without nostalgia. And above all, without hope. I know that it is immortal, and that, if we are anything, we are the hope of something. For me, expectation has spent itself. I quit the nevertheless, the even, the in spite of everything, the moratoriums, the excuses and forgiving. I know the mechanism of the trap of morality and the drowsiness of certain words. I have lost faith in all those constructions of stone, ideas, ciphers. I quit. I no longer defend this broken tower. And, in silence, I await the event.

  A light breeze, slightly chilly, will start to blow. The newspapers will talk of a cold wave. The people will shrug their shoulders and continue life as always. The first deaths will barely swell the daily count, and no one in the statistics bureau will notice that extra zero. But after a while everyone will begin to look at each other and ask: what’s happening? Because for months doors and windows are going to rattle, furniture and trees will creak. For years there will be a shivering in the bones and a chattering of teeth, chills and goose bumps. For years the chimneys, prophets, and chiefs will howl. The mist that hangs over stagnant ponds will drift into the city. And at noon beneath the equivocal sun, the breeze will drag the smell of dry blood from a slaughterhouse abandoned even by flies.

  No use going out or staying at home. No use erecting walls against the impalpable. A mouth will extinguish all the fires, a doubt will root up all the decisions. It will be everywhere without being anywhere. It will blur all the mirrors. Penetrating walls and convictions, vestments and well-tempered souls, it will install itself in the marrow of everyone. Whistling between body and body, crouching between soul and soul. And all the wounds will open because, with expert and delicate, although somewhat cold, hands, it will irritate sores and pimples, will burst pustules and swellings and dig into the old, badly healed wounds. Oh fountain of blood, forever inexhaustible! Life will be a knife, a gray and agile and cutting and exact and arbitrary blade that falls and slashes and divides. To crack, to claw, to quarter, the verbs that move with giant steps against us!

  It is not the sword that shines in the confusion of what will be. It is not the saber, but fear and the whip. I speak of what is already among us. Everywhere there are trembling and whispers, insinuations and murmurs. Everywhere the light wind blows, the breeze that provokes the immense whiplash each time it unwinds in the air. Already many carry the purple insignia in their flesh. The light wind rises from the meadows of the past, and hurries closer to our time.

  Octavio Paz (1951), translated from the Spanish by Eliot Weinberger

  Around the Star’s Throne

  A sea of feathers billows. It billows with happy billows. It billows with hilarious, happy billows of white, red and yellow feathers. It chirps, crows, pipes, flirts and trills around the star’s throne. But how are we to imagine the throne of the star? Deep, formless, blue, unending, green, terrifying.

  Hans Arp (1951), translated from the German by Bethany Schneider

  The God of War

  I saw the old god of war standing on a stump, on one side an abys
s, on the other a cliff wall.

  He smelled of free beer and carbolic and he showed off his gonads to the teenagers, the while some professors had rejuvenated him.

  In his hoarse wolf’s voice he declared his love for all that is young. And there was a pregnant woman standing by, and she shivered.

  And he continued without shame, presenting himself as a great champion of order. And he described how he created order in the barns, by emptying them.

  As a man may scatter crumbs for the sparrows, so he fed poor people with crusts of bread he had taken from poor people. His voice was sometimes loud, sometimes quiet, but always hoarse.

  In a loud voice he spoke of the great times to come, and in a quiet voice he taught the women how to boil crows and seagulls.

  All the while he was uneasy in himself, and he looked over his shoulder time and again as if in fear of a stab in the back.

  And every five minutes he assured his public that he was minded to make his entrance brief.

  Bertolt Brecht (1949), translated from the German by Thomas Kuhn

  The Swift

  Swift with wings too wide, wheeling and shrieking his joy around the house. Such is the heart.

  He dries up thunder. He sows in the serene sky. If he touches ground, he tears himself apart.

  His response is the swallow, the familiar, whom he detests. What value has lace from the tower?

  His pause is in the most somber hollow. No one lives in space more narrow than he.

  Through the summer of long brightness, he will streak his way in shadows, by the blinds of midnight.

  No eyes can hold him. He shrieks for his only presence. A slight gun is about to fell him. Such is the heart.

  René Char (1948), translated from the French by Mary Ann Caws