Alone and Not Alone
Page 5
because I’m now not sure
just what it means.
A coppice is a thicket,
no?
Oh you’re such
an American! out
of touch
with the natural world
and English English
and your own adolescence
all at the same time!
Alas, I’ve wandered
lonely as a crowd
of words
blown down the street
this way and that,
vagabond lexicon
dressed as a citizen.
Maybe a wood or a grove?
I’ve always liked
my grandfather’s name Grover
and one of the most beautiful girls
of my adolescence was named
Madeleine Grove
and back then
my favorite publisher was Grove.
Shady Grove, my true love
the song goes. Them
I remember. Copse
and coppice are phonemes
from literature. I preferred
cops and robbers.
But it got better.
I nabbed the robbers
and shot a few Indians
clean out of their saddles
but they didn’t have saddles
and weren’t even Indians
and it didn’t matter:
you had to go
and in a few minutes
I did too,
due as I was
in this verdant copse
splashed with shadows
that shift and wave like plaid
in the wind from off the brae.
Manifestation and Mustache
I love living here
away from a lot of things
that annoy me
and close to a lot
of things I love
like air like trees
and emptiness.
But the thing
I love best
goes where I go
and will go with me
when I am gone
from where I am
and into
where love
doesn’t figure,
which I have done
a few times
in my life,
if memory serves.
Then
the mustache
comes in
and says,
“You can’t be right
and wrong
at the same time,”
but I don’t believe it.
Shipwreck in General
Is there no end to anything ever
I release the question mark
From its tether and it floats
Like a life jacket
In search of the shipwreck
That every question is
But today it finds no victim
No flotsam no captain’s cap
For today is shipwreck-free it is
The end of shipwreck in general
And the curl and the dot below
Can go their separate ways
And be whatever they like
French Art in the 1950s
Ronnie is finding out about art in the 1950s. He is learning that it had a palette and brushes and colors, and the palette had a hole, in which the brushes were inserted and where they seemed debonnaire and ready to do something but also happy not to. There is an artist in the room. He wears a smock and a beret, and he has a pencil mustache. His name is Pierre, for he is French. Art comes from France. Pierre is going to bring some more of it to us. But at the moment he is thinking about what he is going to paint today. A pear? A young woman who is wearing no clothing? Or perhaps just a lot of colors flying around on the canvas, to represent his feelings?
But wait, it is time for lunch. Later in the afternoon he will execute his picture. For now he must go to the café and greet his admirers, who, on seeing him, call out “Pierre!” and “Over here, Pierre!” and, cleverly, “There he is, the rascal!” But everyone knows that Pierre is not a rascal. He is a French artist. You can tell by the smock he has forgotten to remove. Later, when it has paint smears and spots on it, even an imbecile will be able to see that he is an artist. Ronnie already knows.
Three Poems in Honor of Willem de Kooning
I Felt
For a moment
as if I were talking to you
and you were listening
and taking me seriously
the way a grandfather does
when he’s open and kind,
you knew what
was troubling me
and you knew
that the best thing to do
was to listen
and say nothing,
allowing a calm to settle
into the grandfather
that turns out to be me.
The Door to the River
You walked through it before
you even knew it was there
The river came up to the door
and asked to come in
Then the river came through the door
and the door floated away
I once threw away a river
because it looked old enough
And I bought a new one
and a door along with it
Except it never was a door
It was a doorway
Like Norway
with windows
Zot
In de Kooning’s painting, the word zot.
I thought sot?
Then learned that zot
is Dutch for foolish. So
foolish and drunk swirled around
and separated out
into the Dutch foolish and the English drunk.
He wasn’t such a big drinker
when he did that painting,
but maybe he felt like a fool sometimes
—of course he did.
He was zot and he knew it
and he told you so, you
being almost nobody,
so almost nobody you were
even more zot than he!
Zot is vat I tink.
Alone and Not Alone
Out of the water
came the one
who reached back
into the water
and pulled out the zero.
The time is now.
The time is now 8:15 p.m.
Eastern Standard Time.
In Beijing Lan Lan
is getting up
tomorrow.
I see her pretty, smiling face
as she curls back the covers.
Tonight I
will get under the covers
and think of her face
not because I
am in love with her
but because I
like her face
though I
do not want it
on my head.
Out of the water
came my head,
head first, whoosh!
A person’s head
does not belong
underwater.
Look at fish!
Who wants to be one?
I would
for a moment
or two. Then
back to me.
It would be terrible
to alternate
being fish
and person
every few seconds.
We inhale
then exhale
every few seconds.
Lan Lan’s
two daughters
are inhaling and exhaling,
still asleep—
it is Sunday
in Beijing.
Lan Lan’s husband
is sitting at a table
in the kitchen
thinking
about the poetry
of Alexander Blok.
Alexander Blok
is pouring hot water
into the teapot.
Out of the water
came the tea
and out of the tea
came the scent of jasmine.
And then Alexander Blok
was not there.
He had to go away
and die again.
He exhaled and then
exhaled, and then
was like a dead fish,
wrapped in a newspaper
whose headline says
BLOK DEAD.
He reached back
and pulled himself
out of life
and into those two words.
Lan Lan’s husband
looks up confused—
his mind is in Russian
but everything else
is in Chinese
when she comes in
and the jasmine is deeper
and more of you now.
It is 8:33.
What happened?
You were not alone
in thinking you were alone.
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Alone and Not Alone was designed at Coffee House Press, in the historic Grain Belt Brewery’s Bottling House near downtown Minneapolis. The text is set in Adobe Garamond. Composition by Bookmobile Design & Digital Publisher Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Manufactured by Versa Press on acid- free paper.
RON PADGETT grew up in Tulsa and has lived mostly in New York City since 1960. Among his many honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters poetry award, the Shelley Memorial Award, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. Padgett’s How Long was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry and his Collected Poems won the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for the best poetry book of 2013. In addition to being a poet, he is a translator of Guillaume Apollinaire, Pierre Reverdy, and Blaise Cendrars. His own work has been translated into eighteen languages.