Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present

by Unknown

  12:00

  (2)

  LUMINARY. In 1903, he turned his attention to the east . . .

  (9)

  WATERLOO. Napoleon loses because severe case of hemorrhoids prevents him from concentrating on the course of the battle.

  (11)

  FINISHING TOUCHES. A cloud floats up to the moon and stops. Jolting finale avoided.

  (1982)

  Acknowledgments

  The author wishes to express his profound gratitude to the following publications in which some of these works previously appeared: Architectural Digest: “This Lime-tree Bower My Prison”; Teen Life: “On the Death of Chatterton”; Cosmopolitan: “Constancy to an Ideal Object”; Bon Appétit: “Drinking versus Thinking”, “The Eagle and the Tortoise”; La Cucina Italiana: “Fire, Famine and Slaughter”; House Beautiful: “Kublai Khan”, “This Lime-tree Bower My Prison”; Better Homes and Gardens: “This Lime-tree Bower My Prison”, “Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement”, “Fears in Solitude”, “Dejection: an Ode”; Modern Bride: “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”; American Bride: “A Lover’s Complaint to His Mistress Who Deserted Him in Quest of a More Wealthy Husband in the East Indies”; Mechanics Illustrated: “Work Without Hope”; Popular Mechanics: “Work Without Hope”; Interiors: “Kublai Khan”; Sports Illustrated: “Dejection: an Ode”; Hustler: “Christabel.”

  (1999)

  JOHN GODFREY (1945–)

  So Let’s Look At It Another Way

  Any woman who can give birth to God deserves, I think, a pretty lively dole, provided by God, however, not by me. I’ve got my own eggs to hatch, and my own coat to button in the particulate wind. Gather around me, streetcorners, and I will give you the avenue of your dreams! I will give three sharp coughs while your fingertips read that spot inside my hip, my pelvis tone, my sixth-story bone. I’ll be here when the whole world shakes, I’ll be compatible to cheapness and to achievement. I’ll have ambitions on my mind and panties on my floor. I’ll have tons of red paint on my black-paint door. And you know what else? I’ll call it “killer monkey doing all this stuff too close to prayer.”

  So let’s look at it another way. It’s 9 a.m. and I’m walking west from my door. The only person on the shadowed side of the street, and the shadow is cool, is a thin girl with long wavy hair, hiding her face, which she holds down. White girl slinking where to the east? All night long turned to misery crystals by the Hopperesque walls. I beg your pardon, lady, on behalf of your trade. I see on you the marks your monkeys made.

  Invisible monkeys blow into the naked eye, and dust big as rocks. October is taking place so beautifully, and when I sleep pain touches my hair. That’s why I always seem to be running past parked cars, and past you whom I love. In some crazy way I am running for your pleasure, out of all the pleasures I could imagine.

  (1984)

  BERNADETTE MAYER (1945–)

  Visions or Desolation

  Come on, there’s always the chance kids will do this, fight uncontrollably crazy screaming like howling buddhas and tearing each other’s never cut before hair out, the bigger ones hitting the smaller ones on the heads with metal tops like latent homo- and heterosexuals with fierce exclamatory natures. Our plan is to just do everything ourselves without any babysitters for the next two weeks and then the classes are over, then we’ll go to New York for a while again, the midwife said I had a neat uterus and she could feel whole arms and legs of the baby, I was waking and talking to a woman on the phone the other day about a playgroup and she kept using the word “shoot,” kept saying, “Shoot I would do anything” and “Shoot I understand what you mean, yes shoot,” then we’ll come back here and spend January getting ready to have the baby, then the baby will be born at the end of that month, I can’t find Dr. Spock can you? but before that we have to gather together all the things we need for the birth and for the baby, cotton balls and undershirts and roasted towels and a bureau for the baby’s clothes and Marie needs a new coat, and we have to do some laundry sometime, when she plays outside now and squats to dig in the dirt the skin of her back is exposed to the air, and they both need new tights, there isn’t any snow on the ground yet, it’s easy to rely on the beat Poets when you’re teaching, any more abstract stuff often turns the students off, they find Frank O’Hara much too difficult, I also want alot of red velvet material and a big red rug to induce feelings that can go past the moon, it’s full again today, those regressive souls in my classes keep talking about how LSD makes deformed babies, these matches are called Rosebud because they have red tips of fire, so many times when you’re pregnant people can’t help but tell you all the worst stories they ever heard, I miss the part of Main Street in Lenox right in front of the bank where the crosswalk led across to the entrance to the library and the buses and cars came circling around the obelisk, Henniker’s equivalent of an obelisk is a kind of former fountain on a triangular island at the foot of which is always lying an old apple core and a discarded ribbon, when I look up I see a portrait of a man holding a glove, if Russell doesn’t see us at all tomorrow perhaps he’ll think we’re not there, I have only twenty minutes left if I’m going to get any sleep, what can I give you, is writing this offering? Lying in bed is a turmoil, anything can enter in, early tomorrow a woman will come with some children, she will be able to explain things to me about this town, she teaches cross-country skiing, now why don’t I do something like that instead of wondering only about babies, poetry, the city, the country and the wisdom I was trying to talk to you about, yet I must’ve sounded a little corrupt when I said that. I do wonder also about you and your way of slumping in a chair which confounds your other way of looking like a jogger in pajamas, I shouldn’t mention pajamas or everyone will make fun of me, I’m sort of looking forward to this January of heavy snows and waiting, bitter cold and never parting again for a while. I don’t like teaching, it distracts us, it’s like everything else everybody says is healthy, skiing jogging and sitting up straight and being independent, eating seaweed and living in the country, the protean brain, or the other way around: Montherlant is nothing if not protean. A peninsula is a body of land almost completely surrounded by water. Some old people live on one can of soup a day. A little peach in the orchard grew, a little peach of emerald hue . . . . I was reading this novel about a man who burned his girlfriend’s house down and then later was almost completely the cause of her father’s death and they try to make a case for this rogue being rather an expression of the girl’s own destructive instincts so the book winds up without a sense of humor (ENDLESS LOVE) and so am I, it’s better to go back to NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND for that. More subtle like the weather’s blatancy (does that mean wind?). But I’m sure you never asked me for my opinions, you asked me for something of beauty, like the idea of the constructing of a house, something less than esoteric, something formal that also has a use, a wedding song or a description of some semi-precious stones. How am I supposed to fit into this life where children eat so much expensive fruit and leave their trucks in the sand to be run over by the diaper man, will the fleshy inflorescence of a collection of color photographs still look like a pineapple or pine cone or a small bomb that looks like one of those? You and I like having each other to ourselves, I compare the two hands of the two yous but I still can’t tell if the hurt one is swollen, why do we have so many injuries lately, is it wrong to walk into a door or let windows slam on your hands, to be slightly stabbed by the midwife to determine the iron content . . . . Something shifts and as Wittgenstein would say, and anybody else not normal, to take some pleasure in being obsessively careful, to quietly comb out the baby’s hair and take one’s time, to decorate the children with ribbons and whisper to them, to prepare special foods, secret inducements, to linger conversing about the dreams in bed, to encourage the counting of peanuts, these are the methods of the usual, inducements to the ordinary, to pass the time, to adduce pleasure, to encounter danger, to see silver spots before the eyes without fear, the safest form wi
thin which to take risks, the advertisement of the day’s misery if I can still look up and see the man with the glove and a chance image of the accumulation of objects, the storehouse of pictures which will not work out in memory, there’s only one time when you can’t be doing this or that kind of work and have something like a drink make it easier than it is, and that’s when you’re giving birth to a baby but there’s nothing new about that. I wish I could try it as a man for once and be the one watching nervously instead of the inhabitant of this always female body, always momentarily fertile and prone to that if I can use that word, it’s worse than taking LSD, not over till it’s over, hoping the baby will be born before another child wakes up, warning people that your screams are not real screams like in a movie or book, expressions of the forward movement of time or movements of the forward expression of time like words, in that case scream is to lean forward and make the time pass faster, hours by clocks in what they still call labor, different from plain work, working in contractions of the muscles of the . . . and so on, you know all about it I’m sure, lucidly there’s space in between during which you feel like yourself again and that is like the book, then when the baby is finally born you don’t know for a moment if you’re thinking of yourself or the other, there’s no reason why the words other and mother ought like an otter to rhyme, they didn’t in Middle English, but then you wouldn’t want to know the derivations for mother, the lees or dregs, I won’t go into that, which is why it’s difficult to remember to immediately hold the baby, you don’t know the baby is different from you, especially if someone else is there. I had a baby once drawn out by forceps from my unwitting unconscious body and when I woke up I said, what was it. It’s worth the tedious trip of consciousness with all the unnecessary pains to thus conquer nature with memory’s astuteness, it’s like the perception of color in after images. There is an end to the sensation, so of this letter.

  (1992)

  ALICE NOTLEY (1945–)

  Untitled

  the purple menstrual blood on the toilet paper, with small clots is the horse’s. the horse in blinders goes. silver spine behind a shape. in a long blue dress in the cave, I asked the golden light to make me warm but it did not. there were other secretions on the toilet paper, sticky familiar substances. I can’t identify which would signify grief if I were meaning the realm of the cries of the throat of the city pigeon hated. she wrote all over my door, I said I have to live here you know. there are blunt boxlike black shapes ahead. every one of them means its silence as the light breathes and grows in the cool cabriolet pulled by a horse unseen. then we were aboard a ship, and the horse swam alongside, I was taking the most elementary course afraid I wouldn’t pass the test, because the diction of the essays must be elegant, the drawings exquisitely textured, how can there be a test going on? I call the predator to my shoulder, I remember to walk. I’m leaving the cafe before the reading, which they the young can give. I’ll go wherever I want. the blood on my thighs.

  you will will you. the feelings are a puddle of purple for wisdom blood, and the other secretions are objective as well but still unnamed by society: the last of the idea of a nature. you can grieve for the loss of identity, if you want to. the parts have not been fitting. that’s why “I” arrived. “I” will neither take the course nor bother about the blood any more. “I” is the horse, “I” is I, am in my metallics, as the box was similar metal-encased I, casting off, the images are meaningless, but there. I stopped reflecting the stain grew and the purple saturated the sheet. the one who tells us about the horse is pale and pure. the menses of a horse in the room of painful emissions, of a house. in a house. this horse. and trees bend down in the whole world denied, grief only encounters ashtrays as if I were smoking, put it out. I’m free because there’s much less to matter to, I am freer, I’m the overseer of the body.

  my hair is a mess, uncombed, pinned back and up, all brown. I’m wearing a denim skirt, and denim jacket. I help the young man with spiky hair position himself behind the microphone, then I leave the room, a cafe where a poetry reading will take place. to the side are two other young poets with spiky hair, sitting in highchairs. I leave to the cave as always because alone I is free, the long blue dress is to see that blue is its choice of image but the meaning was forgotten. I has been selected because I couldn’t simplify my direction. I knows everything next. I in blue, I with owl, I into light, I fly up or down. I the horse and I bleeds, that is just bleeding. I is secreting emotional and intellectual matter, soft and dark, I doesn’t I don’t need it any more.

  (2002)

  IRA SADOFF (1945–)

  Seurat

  It is a Sunday afternoon on the Grand Canal. We are watching the sailboats trying to sail along without wind. Small rowboats are making their incisions on the water, only to have the wounds seal up again soon after they pass. In the background, smoke from the factories and smoke from the steamboats merge into tiny clouds above us, then disappears. Our mothers and fathers walk arm in arm along the shore clutching tightly their umbrellas and canes. We are sitting on a blanket in the foreground, but even if someone were to take a photograph, only our closest relatives would recognize us: we seem to be burying our heads between our knees.

  I remember thinking you were one of the most delicate women I had ever seen. Your bones seemed small and fragile as a rabbit’s. Even so, beads of perspiration begin to form on your wrist and forehead—if we were to live long enough we’d have been amazed at how many clothes we forced ourselves to wear. At this time I had never seen you without your petticoats, and if I ever gave thought to such a possibility I’d chastise myself for not offering you sufficient respect.

  The sun is very hot. Why is it no one complains of the heat in France? There are women doing their needlework, men reading, a man in a bowler hat smoking a pipe. The noise of the children is absorbed by the trees. The air is full of idleness, there is the faint aroma of lilies coming from somewhere. We discuss what we want for ourselves, abstractly, it seems only right on a day like this. I have ambitions to be a painter, and you want a small family and a cottage in the country. We make everything sound so simple because we believe everything is still possible. The small tragedies of our parents have not yet made an impression on us. We should be grateful, but we’re too awkward to think hard about very much.

  I throw a scaling rock into the water; I have strong arms and before the rock sinks it seems to have nearly reached the other side. When we get up we have a sense of our own importance. We could not know, taking a step back, looking at the total picture, that we would occupy such a small corner of the canvas, and that even then we are no more than tiny clusters of dots, carefully placed together without touching.

  (1975)

  ANNE WALDMAN (1945–)

  Stereo

  Marriage marriage is like you say everything everything in stereo stereo fall fall on the bed bed at dawn dawn because you work work all night. Night is an apartment. Meant to be marriage. Marriage is an apartment & meant people people come in in because when when you marry marry chances are there will be edibles edibles to eat at tables tables in the house. House will be the apartment which is night night. There there will be a bed bed & an extra bed bed a clean sheet sheet sheet or two two for guests guests one extra towel. Extra towel. How will you be welcomed? There will be drinks drinks galore galore brought by armies of guests guests casks casks of liquors liquors and brandies brandies elixirs sweet & bitter bitter bottle of Merlot Merlot Bustelo coffee. Will you have some when I offer. When you are married married there will be handsome gifts for the kitchen kitchen sometimes two of every thing. Everything is brand brand new new. Espresso coffee cups, a Finnish plate, a clock, a doormat, pieces of Art. And books of astonishing Medical Science with pictures. Even richer lexicons. When you are married married there will be more sheets sheets & towels towels arriving arriving & often often a pet pet or two two. You definitely need a telephone when you are married. Two two lines lines. You need need separate separate e
lectronicmail electronicmail accounts accounts. When you are married married you will have sets sets of things things, of more sheets and towels matching, you will have duplicates of things, you will have just one tablecloth. When you are married married you will be responsible when neighbors neighbors greet you. You will smile smile in unison unison or you might say he is fine, she is fine, o she is just down with a cold, o he is consoling a weary traveler just now, arrived from across the Plains. She my husband is due home soon, he my wife is busy at the moment, my husband he is very very busy busy at the moment moment this very moment. Meant good-bye, good-bye. When you are married married sex sex will happen happen without delay delay. You will have a mailbox mailbox and a doorbell doorbell. Bell bell ring ring it rings rings again a double time. You do not have to answer. That’s sure for when you are married people people understand understand you do not not have to answer answer a doorbell doorbell because sex sex may happen happen without delay delay. You will hear everything twice, through your ears and the ears of the other. Her or him as a case case maybe be. He & he & her & her as a case case may be may be. When you are married married you can play play with names names and rename yourself if you like. You can add a name, have a double name with a hyphen if you like. You can open joint accounts when you are married. Marriage is no guarantee against depression. A shun is no guarantee against anything. Marriage is no guarantee against resolution. Revolution is a tricky word word. Here, you hear here? Marriage is sweeter sweeter than you think. Think.