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

  Then the players crash together, their hockey sticks raised like lobster claws. They fight with slow motions, as if undersea . . . they are fighting over some woman back in the motel, but like lobsters they forget what they’re battling for; the clack of the armor plate distracts them, and they feel a pure rage.

  Or a fighter sails over to the penalty box, where ten-year-old boys wait to sit with the criminal, who is their hero . . . . They know society is wrong, the wardens are wrong, the judges hate individuality . . . .

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  The Goalie

  And this man with his peaked mask, with slits, how fantastic he is, like a white insect who has given up on evolution in this life; his family hopes to evolve after death, in the grave. He is ominous as a Dark Ages knight . . . the Black Prince. His enemies defeated him in the day, but every one of them died in their beds that night . . . . At his father’s funeral, he carried his own head under his arm.

  He is the old woman in the shoe, whose house is never clean, no matter what she does. Perhaps this goalie is not a man at all, but a woman, all women; in her cage everything disappears in the end; we all long for it. All these movements on the ice will end, the seats will come down, the stadium walls bare . . . . This goalie with his mask is a woman weeping over the children of men, that are cut down like grass, gulls that stand with cold feet on the ice . . . . And at the end, she is still waiting, brushing away before the leaves, waiting for the new children developed by speed, by war . . .

  (1972)

  Warning to the Reader

  Sometimes farm granaries become especially beautiful when all the oats or wheat are gone, and wind has swept the rough floor clean. Standing inside, we see around us, coming in through the cracks between shrunken wall boards, bands or strips of sunlight. So in a poem about imprisonment, one sees a little light.

  But how many birds have died trapped in these granaries. The bird, seeing freedom in the light, flutters up the walls and falls back again and again. The way out is where the rats enter and leave; but the rat’s hole is low to the floor. Writers, be careful then by showing the sunlight on the walls not to promise the anxious and panicky blackbirds a way out!

  I say to the reader, beware. Readers who love poems of light may sit hunched in the corner with nothing in their gizzards for four days, light failing, the eyes glazed . . .

  They may end as a mound of feathers and a skull on the open boardwood floor . . .

  (1990)

  A Rusty Tin Can

  Someone has stepped on this tin can, which now has the shape of a broken cheekbone. It has developed a Franciscan color out in the desert, perhaps some monk who planted apple trees in the absent pastures, near the graveyard of his friends. The can’s texture is rough and reminds one of Rommel’s neck. When the fingers touch it, they inquire if it is light or heavy. It is both light and heavy like Mrs. Mongrain’s novel we just found in the attic, written seventy years ago. None of the characters are real but in any case they’re all dead now.

  (2001)

  One Day at a Florida Key

  Here we are at Whitehorse Key. It is early morning. The tide is out. Hints of “earlier and other creation” . . . And the sea, having slept all night, seems heated, immobile, uncenturied, robust, abundant, low-voiced. On a dead tree just offshore, fourteen pelicans are drying their wings and encouraging their stomach linings. Now they can look down and see the helpless shining fish once more.

  The day has gone by; it is early dusk. The sun is setting down through a neighboring island. We see dark ragged lines of trees, braced behind shiny, coppery water, given a momentary further darkness by a leaping fish, given broad strokes of murder by a pelican lumbering shoreward, then diving with a splash like a car wreck, rising cradling a fish in his bill, and so emerging triumphant.

  Just before dark, the rosy band left by the setting sun begins to evaporate. The sun disk is gone, leaving behind the solitary, funereal, obscure, Jesuitical, cloud-reflecting, cloud-worshipping, altar-mad, boat-strewn Florida waters.

  (2002)

  ALLEN GINSBERG (1926–1997)

  A Supermarket in California

  What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.

  In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!

  What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!—and you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

  I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.

  I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?

  I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.

  We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

  Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?

  (I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.)

  Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we’ll both be lonely.

  Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?

  Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

  (1955)

  JAMES MERRILL (1926–1995)

  Three Poems from “Prose of Departure”

  River Trip

  Short walk through fields to soft-drink stand where boats wait—all aboard! Creak of rope oarlock. One man pulls the single oar, another poles, a third steers, a fourth stands by to relieve the first. High-up shrine, bamboo glade. Woodland a cherry tree still in bloom punctuates like gun-smoke. Egret flying upstream, neck cocked. Entering the (very gentle) rapids everyone gasps with pleasure. The little waves break backwards, nostalgia con moto, a drop of fresh water thrills the cheek. And then? Woodland, bamboo glade, high-up shrine. Years of this have tanned and shriveled the boatmen. For after all, the truly exhilarating bits

  were few, far between

  —boulders goaded past, dumb beasts

  mantled in glass-green

  gush—and patently

  led where but to the landing,

  the bridge, the crowds. We

  step ashore, in our clumsiness hoping not to spill these brief impressions.

  Sanctum

  Another proscenium. At its threshold we sit on our heels, the only audience. Pure bell notes, rosaries rattled like dice before the throw. Some young priests—the same who received us yesterday, showed us to our rooms, served our meal, woke us in time for these matins—surround a candlelit bower of bliss. The abbot briskly enters, takes his place, and leads them in deep, monotonous chant. His well-fed back is to us. He faces a small gold pagoda flanked by big gold lotus trees overhung by tinkling pendants of gold. Do such arrangements please a blackened image deep within? To us they look like Odette’s first drawing room (before Swann takes charge of her taste) lit up for a party, or the Maison Dorée he imagines as the scene of her infidelities. Still, when the abbot turns, and with a gesture invites us to place incense upon the brazier already full of warm, fragrant ash, someone—myself perhaps—tries vainly

  to hold back a queer

  sob. Inhaling the holy

  smoke, praying for dear

  life—

  In the Shop

  Out came the most fabulous kimono of all: dark, dark purple traversed by a winding, starry path. To what function, dear hea
rt, could it possibly be worn by the likes of—

  Hush. Give me your hand. Our trip has ended, our quarrel was made up. Why couldn’t the rest be?

  Dyeing. A homophone deepens the trope. Surrendering to Earth’s colors, shall we not be Earth before we know it? Venerated therefore is the skill which, prior to immersion, inflicts upon a sacrificial length of crêpe de Chine certain intricate knottings no hue can touch. So that one fine day, painstakingly unbound, this terminal gooseflesh, the fable’s whole eccentric

  star-puckered moral—

  white, never-to-blossom buds

  of the mountain laurel—

  may be read as having emerged triumphant from the vats of night.

  (1988)

  FRANK O’HARA (1926–1966)

  Meditations in an Emergency

  Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French?

  Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there’ll be nothing left with which to venture forth.

  Why should I share you? Why don’t you get rid of someone else for a change?

  I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.

  Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don’t I? I’m just like a pile of leaves.

  However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they’re missing? Uh huh.

  My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up. It makes me restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them still. If only I had grey, green, black, brown, yellow eyes; I would stay at home and do something. It’s not that I’m curious. On the contrary, I am bored but it’s my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the earth. And lately, so great has their anxiety become, I can spare myself little sleep.

  Now there is only one man I love to kiss when he is unshaven. Heterosexuality! you are inexorably approaching. (How discourage her?)

  St. Serapion, I wrap myself in the robes of your whiteness which is like midnight in Dostoevsky. How am I to become a legend, my dear? I’ve tried love, but that hides you in the bosom of another and I am always springing forth from it like the lotus—the ecstasy of always bursting forth! (but one must not be distracted by it!) or like a hyacinth, “to keep the filth of life away,” yes, there, even in the heart, where the filth is pumped in and slanders and pollutes and determines. I will my will, though I may become famous for a mysterious vacancy in that department, that greenhouse.

  Destroy yourself, if you don’t know!

  It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you’ve set. It’s like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.

  “Fanny Brown is run away—scampered off with a Cornet of Horse; I do love that little Minx, & hope She may be happy, tho’ She has vexed me by this Exploit a little too.—Poor silly Cecchina! or F:B: as we used to call her.—I wish She had a good Whipping and 10,000 pounds.”—Mrs. Thrale.

  I’ve got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I’ll be back, I’ll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don’t want me to go where you go, so I go where you don’t want me to. It’s only afternoon, there’s a lot ahead. There won’t be any mail downstairs. Turning, I spit in the lock and the knob turns.

  (1954)

  Schoenberg

  In a fever of style, having slaughtered the false Florimells of harmonious thought and their turgid convincements, he marshalled lightning and the beautiful stench of signed clouds. Some sneered: him a silly Quixote! but he laid waste Central Europe and painted with the salt of Jenghiz the wounds of World War I. Not enough women rubbed their breasts against trees while waiting for big nightingales, so he pushed these ladies, intelligent refugees from Weimar, into a Pierrotless sea, and everywhere the frontiers of a sensibility whose left foot was only then fearfully emerging trembled like the rim of the sun under his hot clothes. The classic grace of a spirit resting on broken glass informed the shell of his virgin Muse with pink echoes from the newspapers, at the mercy of every fresh breath from the tradewinds.

  (1977)

  JOHN ASHBERY (1927–)

  Whatever It Is, Wherever You Are

  The cross-hatching technique which allowed our ancestors to exchange certain genetic traits for others, in order to provide their offspring with a way of life at once more variegated and more secure than their own, has just about run out of steam and has left us wondering, once more, what there is about this plush solitude that makes us think we will ever get out, or even want to. The ebony hands of the clock always seem to mark the same hour. That is why it always seems the same, though it is of course changing constantly, subtly, as though fed by an underground stream. If only we could go out in back, as when we were kids, and smoke and fool around and just stay out of the way, for a little while. But that’s just it—don’t you see? We are “out in back.” No one has ever used the front door. We have always lived in this place without a name, without shame, a place for grownups to talk and laugh, having a good time. When we were children it seemed that adulthood would be like climbing a tree, that there would be a view from there, breathtaking because slightly more elusive. But now we can see only down, first down through the branches and further down the surprisingly steep grass patch that slopes away from the base of the tree. It certainly is a different view, but not the one we expected.

  What did they want us to do? Stand around this way, monitoring every breath, checking each impulse for the return address, wondering constantly about evil until necessarily we fall into a state of torpor that is probably the worst sin of all? To what purpose did they cross-hatch so effectively, so that the luminous surface that was underneath is transformed into another, also luminous but so shifting and so alive with suggestiveness that it is like quicksand, to take a step there would be to fall through the fragile net of uncertainties into the bog of certainty, otherwise known as the Slough of Despond?

  Probably they meant for us to enjoy the things they enjoyed, like late summer evenings, and hoped that we’d find others and thank them for providing us with the wherewithal to find and enjoy them. Singing the way they did, in the old time, we can sometimes see through the tissues and tracings the genetic process has laid down between us and them. The tendrils can suggest a hand; or a specific color—the yellow of the tulip, for instance—will flash for a moment in such a way that after it has been withdrawn we can be sure that there was no imagining, no auto-suggestion here, but at the same time it becomes as useless as all subtracted memories. It has brought certainty without heat or light. Yet still in the old time, in the faraway summer evenings, they must have had a word for this, or known that we would someday need one, and wished to help. Then it is that a kind of purring occurs, like the wind sneaking around the baseboards of a room: not the infamous “still, small voice” but an ancillary speech that is parallel to the slithering of our own doubt-fleshed imaginings, a visible soundtrack of the way we sound as we move from encouragement to despair to exasperation and back again, with a gesture sometimes that is like an aborted movement outward toward some cape or promontory from which the view would extend in two directions—backward and forward—but that is only a polite hope in the same vein as all the others, crumpled and put away, and almost not to be distinguished from any
of them, except that it knows we know, and in the context of not knowing is a fluidity that flashes like silver, that seems to say a film has been exposed and an image will, most certainly will, not like the last time, come to consider itself within the frame.

  It must be an old photograph of you, out in the yard, looking almost afraid in the crisp, raking light that afternoons in the city held in those days, unappeased, not accepting anything from anybody. So what else is new? I’ll tell you what is: you are accepting this now from the invisible, unknown sender, and the light that was intended, you thought, only to rake or glance is now directed full in your face, as it in fact always was, but you were squinting so hard, fearful of accepting it, that you didn’t know this. Whether it warms or burns is another matter, which we will not go into here. The point is that you are accepting it and holding on to it, like love from someone you always thought you couldn’t stand, and whom you now recognize as a brother, an equal. Someone whose face is the same as yours in the photograph but who is someone else, all of whose thoughts and feelings are directed at you, falling like a gentle slab of light that will ultimately loosen and dissolve the crusted suspicion, the timely self-hatred, the efficient cold directness, the horrible good manners, the sensible resolves and the senseless nights spent waiting in utter abandon, that have grown up to be you in the tree with no view; and place you firmly in the good-natured circle of your ancestors’ games and entertainments.