by Ron Padgett
The Alexander Archipenko exhibition was the largest I had ever seen of his work, and as I moved from sculpture to sculpture I felt grateful just to be there. But I wasn’t really “there,” I was in a wholesale meat market. The smell of raw flesh and gore oozes out the ramshackle front doors where trucks have backed up to disgorge sides of beef and pork. Just inside are butchers in threadbare aprons streaked with blood. One of them waddles his mammoth girth toward me, a cigarette dangling from his pudgy lips, a strange leer on his face. He is the one who lewdly propositioned a friend of mine who lives a few doors away. Nineteen sixty-one.
Now, in 2005, I am walking through this museum on the very spot where those butchers slashed and chopped up carcasses. The fat one is no doubt dead, like my friend and Archipenko. The exhibition is fine, but I can’t focus on it, so I simply pause before each piece.
Finally I can’t restrain myself from approaching someone, who happened to be a guard, an Indian or Pakistani woman, to whom I say, “Many years ago, when I first came to New York, I had a friend who lived a few doors down the street. Do you know what this place was then? It was a wholesale meat business.” She looks at me and says, “Yes, it’s amazing the way they change things so fast,” and looks away.
The 1870s
Homage to Michel Butor
1870 Work on Brooklyn Bridge begun. Charles Dickens dies. Jules Verne writes 20,000 Leagues under the Sea. Rockefeller founds Standard Oil. Robert E. Lee dies.
1871 British Columbia joins Canada. Marcel Proust born. Rasputin born. Pneumatic rock drill invented. Stanley meets Livingstone. Whistler paints The Artist’s Mother. The Great Fire of Chicago. P. T. Barnum opens “The Greatest Show on Earth.”
1872 Jesuits expelled from Germany. Grant reelected President. Bertrand Russell born. First operation on the esophagus. Piet Mondrian born.
1873 New York financial panic. Germans evacuate France. First color photograph. Zanzibar abolishes slave trade. E. Remington & Sons, gunsmiths, produce typewriters. Tolstoy writes Anna Karenina. Buda and Pest unite.
1874 Winston Churchill born. Gertrude Stein born. First roller-skating rink. First Impressionist exhibition. Pressure cooking invented. Thomas Hardy writes Far from the Madding Crowd. First ice cream soda.
1875 Carl Jung born. Thomas Mann born. Rainer Maria Rilke born. Maurice Ravel born. Madam Blavatsky founds Theosophical Society. Camille Corot dies. Georges Bizet dies. Hans Christian Andersen dies. First swim across the English Channel.
1876 Korea becomes a nation. Brahms composes Symphony no. 1. Turks massacre Bulgarians. Pablo Casals born. George Sand dies. Bruno Walter born. Carpet sweeper invented. Degas paints The Glass of Absinthe.
1877 Edison invents the phonograph. Gustave Courbet dies. Queen Victoria becomes Empress of India. First contact lenses. Canals on Mars observed. First public telephones in the U.S.
1878 Greece declares war on Turkey. Hughes invents the microphone. Mannlicher invents the repeater rifle. W. A. Burpee does something with Burpee seeds.
1879 British/Zulu War. Joseph Stalin born. Albert Einstein born. Discovery of saccharin. First public telephones in London. Paul Cézanne paints Self-Portrait. Edison has an idea and invents the light bulb.
One Thing Led to Another
If it wasn’t one thing
it was another.
You can’t believe
how charged everything is
with meaning
because it is meaningless.
Joy in the curtains,
the farmer in the dell,
a fellow named
whatever it was—Floyd?
And then you had arms and legs
and it wasn’t funny.
It was a freshly baked pie.
I could care
more or less.
Like a machine
in the heavens, shooting,
or an exclamation point
in the motion picture industry.
Cut.
It’s always something.
“Tuck in your shirt”
is not said to a dog.
What’s the use of whining?
No one really enjoys it.
The Rabbi with a Puzzle Voice
Wait a minute
I forgot something
The rabbi with a puzzle voice
Pieces flying around in the air
Texas Lithuania and now another one
A rectangle
He is singing them
I always knew he was
And the song is oh
I don’t really know what
Very old like a doughnut
And a look through its hole
But he is singing
And that’s the main thing, no?
The other main thing
Is that you’re on that rectangle
Floating to the ground
As it loses its oomph
And other shapes are flying out above you
And you are on them too!
How can this be?
It is part of the jigsaw puzzle
And the sad voice that created it
Why did you have to be anyone
Whoever you are
Is what the rabbi sings
Whoever he is
Maybe he’s not a rabbi at all
There was a reason I had forgotten him
And a reason I remember him
And his puzzle voice
But where are his edges going
As now he too breaks into pieces
Pieces pieces
That arc out in his song
Syntactical Structures
It was as if
while I was driving down a one-lane dirt road
with tall pines on both sides
the landscape had a syntax
similar to that of our language
and as I moved along
a long sentence was being spoken
on the right and another on the left
and I thought
Maybe the landscape
can understand what I say too.
Ahead was a farmhouse
with children playing near the road
so I slowed down
and waved to them.
They were young enough
to smile and wave back.
The World of Us
Who was the first person to say
“I think the world of you”
and how did he or she come up with it?
It’s the kind of thing
one ascribes to a god
or a great philosopher
or a lunatic
on a good day. Now
it’s a cliché
because we can’t think it,
we can only hear ourselves saying it.
There are a lot of things we can’t think
or don’t want to. It’s hard
for example
to think of skin as an organ
—an organ is a kidney or a musical instrument
or even a publication—
but ask any doctor
and the doctor will say
“Yes, the skin is an organ.”
Imagine having that organ removed
(being skinned alive)
or rather don’t
at least not too vividly.
It’s better to keep a barrier
between oneself and things
that can be horrendous
like life.
Don’t go around all day
thinking about life—
doing so will raise a barrier
between you and its instants.
You need those instants
so you can be in them,
and I need you to be in them with me
for I think the world of us
and the mysterious barricades
that make it possible.
But you say
“First you say to raise a barrier
and then not to.”
are two different barriers,
one a barrier against life,
the other a barrier against being alive.
Being alive is good, life is bad.
“So, what about being dead?
Is that bad?
And what about heaven?”
I don’t know about being dead
because I can’t remember what it was like,
but I do know
that it is awful and amusing to be part heaven
and not know which part of you it is.
Unless you don’t think about it,
in which case
you find yourself looking up and saying
“That is the best cornbread I’ve ever eaten.”
Along with it comes a yawn at the end of a long and satisfying day,
everything quiet and thrilling
inside a consciousness surrounded by a night
in which exclamation marks are flying toward a single point.
Curtain
Standing in the bathroom peeing
I look up at the curtain in front of me
red cotton with little yellow flowers
from Liberty Fabrics (London) 1970
and I feel I am flying up into the heavens
until I remember that soon
I will turn 70 and at any moment
I could feel a sudden paroxysmal pain
in my head and with the curtain
dropping away fall over dead—
this could happen right now!
But it doesn’t, the curtain stays put
and I’m standing there
and the curtain still looks good.
Homage to Meister Eckhart
I promised myself
I would explore my void
the space I occupy
and won’t
but I’m still waiting
waiting
waiting in a room
for the room to change into an idea a flower might have
The sun shines down on the flower
in the idea the flower does have at all times
and at all times you hear its thudding
and in between the thuds
is a silence in which a thud almost is
The first time I heard the word void
it was from the Bible: “And the earth
was without form and void.”
I was a child. I thought it meant
the earth was without void.
Which meant nothing to me
because I did not know the meaning of void.
And I didn’t know there was a comma
that changes everything:
“was without form, and void.”
The cosmos changed by a comma!
Years later a big face with no features
came out of the trees in the night
and said, brutally, “Void”
as if handing me a gift
I opened my eyes and there it was
in the mirror it was I or something else
I wasn’t sure
but I was happy to be in between
My soul was growing up
It had learned how to put quotation marks
around everything
which destroyed everything
to make two of everything
one for each eye and one for each ear
but the eyes get further and further apart
from what they see
as the ears get closer and closer
to what they hear
like the dot terribly far away
and big in front of your face
at the same time and loud
So move
the mirror
the Void
into another mirror
or Void
and just let go
But the eyes eventually alight
on words like SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS
printed on the side
of everyone’s head
the way CLEM KADIDDLEHOPPER used to be
and MEISTER ECKHART and MAX JACOB
all appearing nightly
in a revue set in the void of heaven,
the void that allowed God to be there
as the sole spectator
until your void and his void were almost the same
as the void of Spongebob and Max, Clem too,
but not quite, for, as Eckhart says,
“The nothingness of God fills all things
while his somethingness is nowhere”
and so “The very best thing you can do
is to remain still for as long as possible”
and wait for the nothingness of God.
The Incoherent Behavior of Most Lawn Furniture
Suddenly the lawn furniture moves to different spots and stops, overturned or sideways on the ground or hovering in the air, then the pieces jerk, flip, or fly into new spots, in no pattern or rhythm. But the wooden fold-up lawn chair, with its wide strip of canvas forming a gentle sling from top to bottom, remains still. Its striped pattern ripples in the breeze, and though its wooden frame eventually turns gray it never rots or breaks, no matter how inclement the weather. Over the years, however, this lawn chair slowly grows less and less visible, so slowly that no one notices, until it disappears. It remains there, unseen and lost to memory, until one day someone remembers its green and orange stripes, its welcoming curve, its simplicity, there in the sunlight.
The Street
The last time I came back to New York I didn’t know
that it would be the last time you’d be here
though you are still here in the form of you
who a block away walk toward me until it isn’t you,
it’s someone with a fine head and silver hair and blue eyes
and the suggestion of not being like anyone else
and it’s you I’m waiting for as I walk past Little Poland
or come out of New York Central Art Supply or stop to look
at the poppy seed cake in the window of Baczynsky’s on Second Avenue,
the cake I brought up to your place sometimes
when we were working together and you’d say “Tea?”
as if it were spelled with only the one letter.
Knowing you were there made me be more here too,
made New York be New York,
fueled my anger at the new buildings that ruined the old ones
and at the new people with their coarseness and self-involvement
you avoided by going out to buy the Times at 5 a.m.,
then came back and made yourself a pot of espresso
and read the paper as if you were in Tuscany
which is where you soon will be
in that niche in the wall all ten pounds of you
and I’ll leave the city that’s slipped a little further away no a lot.
Paris Again
I’m afraid of the thrill of touching you again
and seeing you appear before my eyes
because you are beautiful the way things used to be.
One day I sat down in a café and ordered an accent aigu
and a citron pressé and looked at Paris.
I said to myself This is Paris and you
are in it so you are Paris too. Garçon,
encore un accent aigu s’il vous plaît
but he didn’t look pleased he was Parisian.
Maybe I too could learn how to be grumpy
and snooty and Cartesian and quick all at the same time.
The Nord-Sud metro line ran all the way
from the tips of my toes to the top of my head
where it paused and went down again
and every time it went past Odéon I thought
of Reverdy and how grumpy
and suddenly fiery he could be and figured
he would have no patience with a guy like me
who had a touch of Max Jaco
b ready
to leap up and turn an angel into a sad witticism
about the God Pierre was wrestling with as if
they were both made of granite. But they weren’t.
And neither was I, like those who love and have loved
and are still afraid of the thrill of the beauty of everything that is gone.
London, 1815
We go clippety-clop
because we are horseshoes
on cobblestones. O
to be a houseshoe
in a house
and resting comfortably
alongside another houseshoe!
But the horse clops on,
our echos echoing
down a dark alley
behind a dark house.
Of Copse and Coppice
When asked
if I knew the meaning
of the word copse c-o-p-s-e
I said “Of course, it means . . .
I think it means a field
or meadow.” One
of the first poems
I ever wrote said
“Where is the copse
with verdant green?”
because at age thirteen
I wanted to use
words new to me.
Now copse is new again