Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present

by Unknown

  It was not a feeling of their being a younger age, since the men were her own age, and she found the men who lacked the leopard features to be as attractive as the one who had those features. She had the feeling of them as adults and her the same age as them, yet had the other feeling as well in order for her to come then.

  She saw a couple who were entwined together and her feeling about them came from the earlier episode of seeing the men who were nude and having the sense of them being adolescent boys. Really she’d had the sense of the men she’d seen as being adults and herself the same age as them. The couple she watched were also around the same age as herself—the man being aware of someone else’s presence after a time and coming. The woman pleased then though she had not come.

  She had intercourse with the man who had the features and organs of a leopard and whom she had first seen with the group of men who lacked these characteristics. The other men were attractive as he was. Yet having the sense of the difference between him and the others, she found it pleasant for him to come and for her not to come that time. The same thing occurred on another occasion with him.

  She compared the man to plants, to the plants having a nervous aspect and being motionless. The man coming when he had the sense of being delayed in leaving—as if being slowed down had made him come and was exciting, and it was during the afternoon with people walking around. He was late and had to go somewhere, and came, with a feeling of delay and retarding—rather than out of nervousness.

  (1985)

  TOM WHALEN (1948–)

  Why I Hate the Prose Poem

  An angry man came into the kitchen where his wife was busying herself about supper and exploded.

  My mother told me this story every day of her life, until one day she exploded.

  But it is not a story, she always pointed out. It’s a prose poem.

  One day I saw a man feeding a hot dog to his dog. The hot dog looked like a stick of dynamite.

  Often simply the sight of a prose poem makes me sick.

  I am unmarried and live alone in a small house.

  In my spare time, I am cultivating a night garden.

  (2000)

  AGHA SHAHID ALI (1949–2001)

  Return to Harmony 3

  Two summers? Epochs, then, of ice.

  But the air is the same muslin, beaten by the sky on Nanga Parbat, then pressed on the rocks of the nearer peaks.

  I run down the ramp.

  On the tarmac, I eavesdrop on Operation Tiger: Troops will burn down the garden and let the haven remain.

  This is home—the haven a cage surrounded by ash—the fate of Paradise.

  Through streets strewn with broken bricks and interrupted by paramilitaries, Irfan drives me straight to the Harmonies (“3” for my father—the youngest brother!), three houses built in a pastoral, that walled acreage of Harmonies where no one but my mother was poor.

  A bunker has put the house under a spell. Shadowed eyes watch me open the gate, like a trespasser.

  Has the gardener fled?

  The Annexe of the Harmonies is locked—my grandmother’s cottage—where her sons offered themselves to her as bouquets of mirrors. There was nothing else to reflect.

  Under the windows the roses have choked in their beds. Was the gardener killed?

  And the postman?

  In the drawer of the cedar stand peeling in the verandah, a pile of damp letters—one to my father to attend a meeting the previous autumn, another an invitation to a wedding.

  My first key opens the door. I break into quiet. The lights work.

  The Koran still protects the house, lying strangely wrapped in a jamawar shawl where my mother had left it on the walnut table by the fireplace. Above, If God is with you, Victory is near!—the framed calligraphy ruthless behind cobwebs.

  I pick up the dead phone, its number exiled from its instrument, a refugee among forlorn numbers in some angry office on Exchange Road.

  But the receiver has caught a transmission: Rafi’s song from a film about war: Slowly, I so slowly, kept on walking, / and then was severed forever from her. THIS IS ALL INDIA RADIO, AMRITSAR. I hang up.

  Upstairs, the window too is a mirror; if I jump through it I will fall into my arms.

  The mountains return my stare, untouched by blood.

  On my shelf, by Ritsos and Rilke and Cavafy and Lorca and Iqbal and Amichai and Paz, my parents are beautiful in their wedding brocades, so startlingly young!

  And there in black and white my mother, eighteen years old, a year before she came a bride to these Harmonies, so unforgivenly poor and so unforgivingly beautiful that the house begins to shake in my arms, and when the unarmed world is still again, with pity, it is the house that is holding me in its arms and the cry coming faded from its empty rooms is my cry.

  (1997)

  LYNN EMANUEL (1949–)

  inside gertrude stein

  Right now as I am talking to you and as you are being talked to, without letup, it is becoming clear that gertrude stein has hijacked me and that this feeling that you are having now as you read this, that this is what it feels like to be inside gertrude stein. This is what it feels like to be a huge typewriter in a dress. Yes, I feel we have gotten inside gertrude stein, and of course it is dark inside the enormous gertrude, it is like being locked up in a refrigerator lit only by a smiling rind of cheese. Being inside gertrude is like being inside a monument made of a cloud which is always moving across the sky which is also always moving. Gertrude is a huge galleon of cloud anchored to the ground by one small tether, yes, I see it down there, do you see that tiny snail glued to the tackboard of the landscape¿ That is alice. So, I am inside gertrude; we belong to each other, she and I, and it is so wonderful because I have always been a thin woman inside of whom a big woman is screaming to get out, and she’s out now and if a river could type this is how it would sound, pure and complicated and enormous. Now we are lilting across the countryside, and we are talking, and if the wind could type it would sound like this, ongoing and repetitious, abstracting and stylizing everything, like our famous haircut painted by Picasso. Because when you are inside our haircut you understand that all the flotsam and jetsam of hairdo have been cleared away (like the forests from the New World) so that the skull can show through grinning and feasting on the alarm it has created. I am now, alarmingly, inside gertrude’s head and I am thinking that I may only be a thought she has had when she imagined that she and alice were dead and gone and someone had to carry on the work of being gertrude stein, and so I am receiving, from beyond the grave, radioactive isotopes of her genius saying, take up my work, become gertrude stein.

  Because someone must be gertrude stein, someone must save us from the literalists and realists, and narratives of the beginning and end, someone must be a river that can type. And why not I¿ Gertrude is insisting on the fact that while I am a subgenius, weighing one hundred five pounds, and living in a small town with an enormous furry male husband who is always in his Cadillac Eldorado driving off to sell something to people who do not deserve the bad luck of this merchandise in their lives—that these facts would not be a problem for gertrude stein. Gertrude and I feel that, for instance, in Patriarchal Poetry when (like an avalanche that can type) she is burying the patriarchy, still there persists a sense of condescending affection. So, while I’m a thin, heterosexual subgenius, nevertheless gertrude has chosen me as her tool, just as she chose the patriarchy as a tool for ending the patriarchy. And because I have become her tool, now, in a sense, gertrude is inside me. It’s tough. Having gertrude inside me is like having swallowed an ocean liner that can type, and, while I feel like a very small coat closet with a bear in it, gertrude and I feel that I must tell you that gertrude does not care. She is using me to get her message across, to say, I am lost, I am beset by literalists and narratives of the beginning and middle and end, help me. And so, yes, I say, yes, I am here, gertrude, because we feel, gertrude and I, that there is real urgency in our voice (like a sob that c
an type) and that things are very bad for her because she is lost, beset by the literalists and realists, her own enormousness crushing her, and we must find her and take her into ourselves, even though I am the least likely of saviors and have been chosen perhaps as a last resort, yes, definitely, gertrude is saying to me, you are the least likely of saviors, you are my last choice and my last resort.

  (1999)

  KIT ROBINSON (1949–)

  The Person

  for Lyn Hejinian

  Increasingly, then, the person becomes a way of doing something, never explicitly experienced as such, because it is the world that is felt, its mute pressure filling out the corners, as of a rhyme. The room gathers each sitter in. The light changes, imperceptibly, always. One, the inevitable protagonist of a paragraph built on second thought, would like nothing better than to sum up and in the application describe that process by which so much detail has been set aside, so as to be clear of it, to stand in the pale light unframed by the body of years spent in collation. The assembly of days, none identical to the last, has taken up much time. So many sources, however, have informed the final mix, that it bears an irreducible mark, one not possible to describe in so many words. The person looks around and sees the same things. It is necessary to change without touching them.

  Here a street or a sky or a bridge become emblems in an elaborate game whose rules the person is only beginning to understand, although an avid player since early childhood. Perhaps it is the availability of such images that prevents one from recognizing their true meaning until much later, when one has withdrawn or been withdrawn from them, through an illness or brush with death, but one has not had time for such things, or been spared them by luck. Mostly it is the call of others that diverts the attention.

  If a child or a woman or a man or an old man or a young woman or a person of questionable age approaches you, what do you think? Many wish to first get out of the way. Others jump at what may seem like the main chance. The one particular person I have come to consider has thought rather to be of assistance, to the extent possible, in relation to this, that and the other thing, however. In this way, this person has become an extraordinary resource for a good number of people. What remains to be seen is a person, walking over a bridge. What is of more interest, however, from the point of view of a junkyard of mangled signs heaped up in silent protest against a century devoted to the material possession of form, is when a person eludes any simple formulation relative to that interest.

  The person is, as cliché-ridden isomorph, a creature of habit. One has certain convictions, obsessions, eccentricities, stylistic features, indications that set one, by prescription, apart. All this is begging the question, a delay tactic, for what most impresses its mark on the spirit, an insistence lived, a laugh in the face of horror, marks its presence without recourse to definition. It is the world that is felt, but it is a made place, and within it they make it who alter its composition simply by living and doing as they will and can do.

  (1998)

  CHARLES BERNSTEIN (1950–)

  Comraderie turns to rivalry when 12 medical students learn that only seven of them will be admitted to the hospital.

  A CIA agent is ordered to feign a breakdown to trap a spy at a mental hospital.

  A field study of Zululand’s mosquitoes and velvet monkeys reveals them to be carriers of viral diseases that cause high fever and bone-wracking pain.

  Defeat comes to the Nazi conquerer: Film footage highlights the February bombing of Dresden; the advance over the Rhine, through the Ruhr and into the heart of Germany; and, from the east, the Russian encirclement of Berlin.

  A brilliant doctor’s erratic behavior causes concern at the hospital.

  On-the-street subjects render fragmented versions; a two-way mirror provides some unexpected “reflections”; a pair of outdoor phone-booths and two muddled conversations befuddle a man.

  A backstage view is interwoven with a tragic story.

  A detective is captured by a mobster who plans to hook him on heroin and then deny him a fix until he reveals the whereabouts of the jealous hood’s former girlfriend.

  A retarded young man witnesses a murder but is not articulate enough to tell his story to the police.

  A husband is betrayed in medieval Japan where adultery is punishable by death.

  Julie grows attached to an abandoned baby.

  A grim smuggling operation and a dead hippie lead to intrigue in Malta.

  Boxed candy includes frog-filled chocolates.

  A girl finds herself between the worlds of the living and dead.

  Henrietta Hippo believes she can predict the future by reading the letters in her alphabet soup.

  A man withers away after being exposed to a strange mist.

  Conspiracy of silence hampers look into fatal beating of teenage thug.

  Bachelors are all agape over a new girl in town.

  Rob sees red when Laura goes blond.

  “Genocide.” Graphic film footage depicts Hitler’s persecution and extermination of the Jewish population in Germany and in the occupied countries.

  A mental patient returns home to a cold mother and a domineering husband.

  A freewheeling narcotics agent works with a junkie’s vengeful widow to track down a shadowy syndicate boss.

  Everyone chips in to help Henrietta Hippo bake enough pies for the country fair.

  It’s the dog pound for Roger when Jeannie turns him into a poodle.

  Nellie has the most lines in the school play, but the player to get the most out of the project is a girl who uses the play to bring her reclusive widowed mother back into society.

  A hot-shot flier thinks he can wage a one-man war in Korea.

  A woman tries to keep her individuality after marriage.

  Bilko feverishly schemes for a way to escape the summer’s heat.

  Lucy makes an impression on her first day at her new job when she breaks the water cooler and floods the office.

  Midget creatures emerge from the center of the earth.

  An emotionally unstable woman unconsciously blots out all memory of seeing her date murdered by her closest friend.

  The corrosiveness of envy and jealousy is demonstrated.

  A blind girl is terrorized by persons unknown at a country estate.

  Strange signals from a nearby island.

  A young woman’s horror of leprosy plagues her.

  (1983)

  ANNE CARSON (1950–)

  On Waterproofing

  Franz Kafka was Jewish. He had a sister, Ottla, Jewish. Ottla married a jurist, Josef David, not Jewish. When the Nuremberg Laws were introduced to Bohemia-Moravia in 1942, quiet Ottla suggested to Josef David that they divorce. He at first refused. She spoke about sleep shapes and property and their two daughters and a rational approach. She did not mention, because she did not yet know the word, Auschwitz, where she would die in October 1943. After putting the apartment in order she packed a rucksack and was given a good shoeshine by Josef David. He applied a coat of grease. Now they are waterproof, he said.

  (1992)

  On Orchids

  We live by tunneling for we are people buried alive. To me, the tunnels you make will seem strangely aimless, uprooted orchids. But the fragrance is undying. A Little Boy has run away from Amherst a few Days ago, writes Emily Dickinson in a letter of 1883, and when asked where he was going, he replied, Vermont or Asia.

  (1992)

  On Hedonism

  Beauty makes me hopeless. I don’t care why anymore I just want to get away. When I look at the city of Paris I long to wrap my legs around it. When I watch you dancing there is a heartless immensity like a sailor in a dead-calm sea. Desires as round as peaches bloom in me all night, I no longer gather what falls.

  (1992)

  On Shelter

  You can write on a wall with a fish heart, it’s because of the phosphorus. They eat it. There are shacks like that down along the river. I am writing this to be as wrong as possi
ble to you. Replace the door when you leave, it says. Now you tell me how wrong that is, how long it glows. Tell me.

  (1992)

  CAROLYN FORCHÉ (1950–)

  The Colonel

  What you have heard is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man’s legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.