Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present Read online

  For Sun and Moon supply their conforming masks, but in this hour of civil twilight all must wear their own faces.

  And it is now that our two paths cross.

  Both simultaneously recognize his Anti-type: that I am an Arcadian, that he is a Utopian.

  He notes, with contempt, my Aquarian belly: I note, with alarm, his Scorpion’s mouth.

  He would like to see me cleaning latrines: I would like to see him removed to some other planet.

  Neither speaks. What experience could we possibly share?

  Glancing at a lampshade in a store window, I observe it is too hideous for anyone in their senses to buy: He observes it is too expensive for a peasant to buy.

  Passing a slum child with rickets, I look the other way: He looks the other way if he passes a chubby one.

  I hope our senators will behave like saints, provided they don’t reform me: He hopes they will behave like baritoni cattivi, and, when lights burn late in the Citadel,

  I (who have never seen the inside of a police station) am shocked and think: “Were the city as free as they say, after sundown all her bureaus would be huge black stones.”:

  He (who has been beaten up several times) is not shocked at all but thinks: “One fine night our boys will be working up there.”

  You can see, then, why, between my Eden and his New Jerusalem, no treaty is negotiable.

  In my Eden a person who dislikes Bellini has the good manners not to get born: In his New Jerusalem a person who dislikes work will be very sorry he was born.

  In my Eden we have a few beam-engines, saddle-tank locomotives, overshot waterwheels and other beautiful pieces of obsolete machinery to play with: In his New Jerusalem even chefs will be cucumber-cool machine minders.

  In my Eden our only source of political news is gossip: In his New Jerusalem there will be a special daily in simplified spelling for non-verbal types.

  In my Eden each observes his compulsive rituals and superstitious tabus but we have no morals: In his New Jerusalem the temples will be empty but all will practice the rational virtues.

  One reason for his contempt is that I have only to close my eyes, cross the iron footbridge to the tow-path, take the barge through the short brick tunnel and

  there I stand in Eden again, welcomed back by the krumhorns, doppions, sordumes of jolly miners and a bob major from the Cathedral (romanesque) of St. Sophie (Die Kalte):

  One reason for my alarm is that, when he closes his eyes, he arrives, not in New Jerusalem, but on some august day of outrage when hellikins cavort through ruined drawing-rooms and fish-wives intervene in the Chamber or

  some autumn night of delations and noyades when the unrepentant thieves (including me) are sequestered and those he hates shall hate themselves instead.

  So with a passing glance we take the other’s posture: Already our steps recede, heading, incorrigible each, towards his kind of meal and evening.

  Was it (as it must look to any god of cross-roads) simply a fortuitous intersection of life-paths, loyal to different fibs,

  or also a rendezvous between accomplices who, in spite of themselves, cannot resist meeting

  to remind the other (do both, at bottom, desire truth?) of that half of their secret which he would most like to forget,

  forcing us both, for a fraction of a second, to remember our victim (but for him I could forget the blood, but for me he could forget the innocence)

  on whose immolation (call him Abel, Remus, whom you will, it is one Sin Offering) arcadias, utopias, our dear old bag of a democracy, are alike founded:

  For without a cement of blood (it must be human, it must be innocent) no secular wall will safely stand.

  (June 1954)

  ELIZABETH BISHOP (1911–1979)

  12 O’Clock News

  gooseneck lamp

  As you all know, tonight is the night of the full moon, half the world over. But there the moon seems to hang motionless in the sky. It gives very little light; it could be dead. Visibility is poor. Nevertheless, we shall try to give you some idea of the lay of the land and the present situation.

  typewriter

  The escarpment that rises abruptly from the central plain is in heavy shadow, but the elaborate terracing of its southern glacis gleams faintly in the dim light, like fish scales. What endless labor those small, peculiarly shaped terraces represent! And yet, on them the welfare of this tiny principality depends.

  pile of mss.

  A slight landslide occurred in the northwest about an hour ago. The exposed soil appears to be of poor quality: almost white, calcareous, and shaly. There are believed to have been no casualties.

  typed sheet

  Almost due north, our aerial reconnaissance reports the discovery of a large rectangular “field,” hitherto unknown to us, obviously man-made. It is dark-speckled. An airstrip? A cemetery?

  envelopes

  In this small, backward country, one of the most backward left in the world today, communications are crude and “industrialization” and its products almost nonexistent. Strange to say, however, signboards are on a truly gigantic scale.

  ink-bottle

  We have also received reports of a mysterious, oddly shaped, black structure, at an undisclosed distance to the east. Its presence was revealed only because its highly polished surface catches such feeble moonlight as prevails. The natural resources of the country being far from completely known to us, there is the possibility that this may be, or may contain, some powerful and terrifying “secret weapon.” On the other hand, given what we do know, or have learned from our anthropologists and sociologists about this people, it may well be nothing more than a numen, or a great altar recently erected to one of their gods, to which, in their present historical state of superstition and helplessness, they attribute magical powers, and may even regard as a “savior,” one last hope of rescue from their grave difficulties.

  typewriter eraser

  At last! One of the elusive natives has been spotted! He appears to be—rather, to have been—a unicyclist-courier, who may have met his end by falling from the height of the escarpment because of the deceptive illumination. Alive, he would have been small, but undoubtedly proud and erect, with the thick, bristling black hair typical of the indigenes.

  ashtray

  From our superior vantage point, we can clearly see into a sort of dugout, possibly a shell crater, a “nest” of soldiers. They lie heaped together, wearing the camouflage “battle dress” intended for “winter warfare.” They are in hideously contorted positions, all dead. We can make out at least eight bodies. These uniforms were designed to be used in guerrilla warfare on the country’s one snow-covered mountain peak. The fact that these poor soldiers are wearing them here, on the plain, gives further proof, if proof were necessary, either of the childishness and hopeless impracticality of this inscrutable people, our opponents, or of the sad corruption of their leaders.

  (1976)

  CZESLAW MILOSZ (1911–)

  Esse

  I looked at that face, dumbfounded. The lights of métro stations flew by; I didn’t notice them. What can be done, if our sight lacks absolute power to devour objects ecstatically, in an instant, leaving nothing more than the void of an ideal form, a sign like a hieroglyph simplified from the drawing of an animal or bird? A slightly snub nose, a high brow with sleekly brushed-back hair, the line of the chin—but why isn’t the power of sight absolute?—and in a whiteness tinged with pink two sculpted holes, containing a dark, lustrous lava. To absorb that face but to have it simultaneously against the background of all spring boughs, walls, waves, in its weeping, its laughter, moving it back fifteen years, or ahead thirty. To have. It is not even a desire. Like a butterfly, a fish, the stem of a plant, only more mysterious. And so it befell me that after so many attempts at naming the world, I am able only to repeat, harping on one string, the highest, the unique avowal beyond which no power can attain: I am, she is. Shout, blow the trumpets, make thousands-strong marches, leap, r
end your clothing, repeating only: is!

  She got out at Raspail. I was left behind with the immensity of existing things. A sponge, suffering because it cannot saturate itself; a river, suffering because reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees.

  (Brie-Comte-Robert, 1954)

  Translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Pinsky

  Be Like Others

  Wherever you lived—in the city of Pergamum at the time of the Emperor Hadrian, in Marseilles under Louis XV, or in the New Amsterdam of the colonists—be aware that you should consider yourself lucky if your life followed the pattern of life of your neighbors. If you moved, thought, felt, just as they did; and, just as they, you did what was prescribed for a given moment. If, year after year, duties and rituals became part of you, and you took a wife, brought up children, and could meet peacefully the darkening days of old age.

  Think of those who were refused a blessed resemblance to their fellow men. Of those who tried hard to act correctly, so that they would be spoken of no worse than their kin, but who did not succeed in anything, for whom everything would go wrong because of some invisible flaw. And who at last for that undeserved affliction would receive the punishment of loneliness, and who did not even try then to hide their fate.

  On a bench in a public park, with a paper bag from which the neck of a bottle protrudes, under the bridges of big cities, on sidewalks where the homeless keep their bundles, in a slum street with neon, waiting in front of a bar for the hour of opening, they, a nation of the excluded, whose day begins and ends with the awareness of failure. Think, how great is your luck. You did not even have to notice such as they, even though there were many nearby. Praise mediocrity and rejoice that you did not have to associate yourself with rebels. For, after all, the rebels also were bearers of disagreement with the laws of life, and of exaggerated hope, just like those who were marked in advance to fail.

  (1998)

  Translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Hass

  KENNETH PATCHEN (1911–1972)

  In Order To

  Apply for the position (I’ve forgotten now for what) I had to marry the Second Mayor’s daughter by twelve noon. The order arrived three minutes of.

  I already had a wife; the Second Mayor was childless: but I did it.

  Next they told me to shave off my father’s beard. All right. No matter that he’d been a eunuch, and had succumbed in early childhood: I did it, I shaved him.

  Then they told me to burn a village; next, a fair-sized town; then, a city; a bigger city; a small, down-at-heels country; then one of “the great powers”; then another (another, another)—In fact, they went right on until they’d told me to burn up every man-made thing on the face of the earth! And I did it, I burned away every last trace, I left nothing, nothing of any kind whatever.

  Then they told me to blow it all to hell and gone! And I blew it all to hell and gone (oh, didn’t I!) . . .

  Now, they said, put it back together again; put it all back the way it was when you started.

  Well . . . it was my turn then to tell them something! Shucks, I didn’t want any job that bad.

  (1954)

  Delighted with Bluepink

  Flowers! My friend, be delighted with what you like; but with something.

  Be delighted with something. Yesterday for me it was watching sun on stones; wet stones.

  I spent the morning lost in the wonder of that. A delight of god’s size.

  The gods never saw anything more enchanting than that. Gorgeous! the sun on wet stones.

  But today what delights me is thinking of bluepink flowers! Not that I’ve seen any . . .

  Actually there isn’t a flower of any kind in the house.—Except in my head.

  But, my friend, oh my friend! what wonderful bluepink flowers! Delight in my bluepink flowers!

  (1954)

  The Famous Boating Party

  Instead of remaining in “C-grade survellesession to Mr. Blaskett” . . . ah, dear, dear little Yellow Hat, I hear you talking but my hands are tied, I’d help you out if I could, believe me, ah poor dear cork abob on life’s troubled waters I always say. However—

  “You are so oh I don’t know so so sort of like they—Goddam Mr. Blaskett and Mrs. Blaskett and all the goddam little Blasketts. Without the tea this time.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “I say I’ll just take the milk and sugar this round. And lemon. Yes, I think it might be nice, the lemon, oh all right no lemon.”

  “It’s five after eight already. You know what—”

  The Announcer: Ladies and gents, your attention please. It is now exactly two and sixty-four minutes past seven. Thank you, thank you, I was coming to that if you will be so kindly. But wait! Things are beginning to do! I’m afraid that something has gone amiss! I will thank you not to panic . . . The management stands behind its usual rights in cases of this kind. I—excuse me—Sam! Hey, Sam! over here . . ! (Aside: No, no, no, no . . . Sam, look, I know you think I did. But I don’t want no mustard on my frank. You know I never take it except plain—no pickle, no relish, no onion, no catsup, no mustard, no nothin!)

  What the fellow said was murder, Sam—not mustard. Uh-huh, that’s right—blew the ship skyhigh . . . Over seven hundred people—just like that, poof-poof.

  (1954)

  DELMORE SCHWARTZ (1913–1966)

  Justice

  What! The same voluble fellow again—such is your speech with yourself, I suppose, upon seeing me again, though this time in a dress suit with a top hat (as if to appeal to the snob and fop in every man, or at least to the upper-class sentiments in all of the lower and middle class). Yes! What a buttonholing mariner! What a jack-in-the-box I am, but truly with a decent motive—to entertain, to be useful—and also to arrive at a point. What point? I do not actually know, except that there must be a point and when I get there I will recognize it, though I scarcely expect to get there very soon, and one who did would equal all the seven wonders of nature of the ancients—the camel, the rainbow, the echo, the cuckoo, the Negro, the volcano, and the sirocco.

  I have been thinking about justice. Naturally: look at what surrounds us. Justice: a fine word and immediately suggesting how beautiful a thing the fact must be, if there is such a fact, either possible or actual. A round, complete, self-contained datum, like an enormous globe radiating a dazzling light which illuminates every corner, subterfuge, and mystery between human beings, not creating, as the sun does (being like all natural things involved in the dialectic of nature) so many morbid shadows, and the black broom of night at once with the bright bloom of day.

  What could I think of, desiring to amuse as well as instruct, also to be pleased and to learn myself—of what but the ancient short story made known to me in childhood by my crippled father, a brief history which has prepossessed me to this day, even with the archness in which my poor father attempted to hide the essential viciousness and despair of the narrative.

  “Once upon a time,” said my father, seated in his wheel chair, and summoning unknowingly in that traditional opening the continuous present necessary to the interest of any story, “Once upon a time,” he repeated, “an old farmer named Schrecklichkeitunendlich” (a name chosen to tickle me) “and his young son Hans, aged ten, went to town taking with them their brown pony named Ego.” “Ego, Father?” I asked. “That is a strange name for a pony or anyone else.” “No, no,” said my bitter father, “it is a well-known name.” “I have never heard of anyone with that name,” I said stubbornly. “Please,” said my father, angered, “if you continue to interrupt me, I will never finish the story, which you begged me to tell you. Father, son, and pony,” my father continued, “started for the market place, and Hans rode the pony. It was a beautiful blue-and-gold day in the month of June, and all three were pleased with all things, the father because he was going to sell the pony and with the proceeds buy a gun with which to kill deer, the son because he had been promised a pair of boxing gloves by the father, and the p
ony merely glad because he was exercising himself and the weather was fine.

  “The three travelers had gone but a mile—the town being four miles distant—when a man with a whip came along from the opposite direction, and seeing them, said indignantly: ‘O pitiless boy! You who are young and strong ride the pony, while your father, the weak old man, walks beside you and by such exertion shortens his days. Get down from the pony, let your father ride, honor your father, remember his weakness.’ Intimidated by this, father and son said nothing, the traveler went on his way absentmindedly, Hans dismounted, and his father mounted the pony.”

  “But they should have had two ponies,” I said to my father. “They had only one,” my father replied. “The number of ponies is not infinite. Many people have only one pony, and as for us, as you know, we have none,” said my father in his embittered voice and continued.

  “They went forward another mile and another stranger approached, holding a gun in his hand, stopped them, took the pony by the halter, standing there as if he were an official authority: ‘Evil old man,’ he said. ‘Selfish father! The young boy must walk while the father rides, as if he were a king and would like to live forever.’ ”

  “A king, Father?” I inquired. “Kings do not live forever. No one does.” “By king, I meant an important person,” he said annoyed and impatient. “Do not, please, interrupt me so often.

  “The stranger stood there so threateningly that the father dismounted. Satisfied, the stranger passed on, leaving father and son completely perplexed, not knowing at all what to do. Suddenly Hans was inspired: ‘Father, Father!’ he said. ‘We will both ride the pony.’ The father saw how intelligent this idea was and said with pride: ‘Hans, you are a smart boy,’ and soon both were mounted on the pony and jogging toward town. The pony’s pace slowed up a bit, but not otherwise did he show himself troubled by the additional weight.