Alone and Not Alone Read online

  Alone and Not Alone

  Copyright © 2015 Ron Padgett

  Cover design © 2014 by Jim Dine

  Book design by Linda Koutsky

  Author photograph © John Sarsgard

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  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Padgett, Ron, 1942–

  [Poems. Selections]

  Alone and not alone / Ron Padgett.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-56689-401-2 (softcover)

  ISBN 978-1-56689-402-9 (eBook)

  I. Title.

  PS3566.A32A6 2014

  811’.54—dc23

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES

  FIRST EDITION | FIRST PRINTING

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Some of the poems in this volume were published in Aphros, Cerise Press, Coconut, Connotation Press, Court Green, Courtland Review, For the One Fund Boston (Granary Books), Hanging Loose, Poem-a-Day (Academy of American Poets), Sentence, Tablet, Test Centre, and Upstreet.

  for Wayne

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Dedication

  What Poem

  The Roman Numerals

  Butterfly

  Reality

  The Chinese Girl

  Smudges

  It Takes Two

  The First Time

  Circles

  Grandpa Brushed His Teeth

  Coffee Man

  Where Is My Head?

  Survivor Guilt

  The Young Cougar

  Radio in the Distance

  Face Value

  The Plank and the Screw

  102 Today

  The Pounding Rabbit

  Mountains and Songs

  It All Depends

  The Elevation of Ideals

  Birgitte Hohlenberg

  Pep Talk

  Preface to Philosophy

  You Know What

  A Bit about Bishop Berkeley

  The Step Theory

  My ’75 Chevy

  For A.

  Art Lessons

  A Few Ideas about Rabbits

  The Value of Discipline

  Pea Jacket

  The Ukrainian Museum

  The 1870s

  One Thing Led to Another

  The Rabbi with a Puzzle Voice

  Syntactical Structures

  The World of Us

  Curtain

  Homage to Meister Eckhart

  The Incoherent Behavior of Most Lawn Furniture

  This Schoolhouse Look

  The Street

  Paris Again

  London, 1815

  Of Copse and Coppice

  Manifestation and Mustache

  Shipwreck in General

  French Art in the 1950s

  Three Poems in Honor of Willem de Kooning I Felt

  The Door to the River

  Zot

  Alone and Not Alone

  Funder Acknowledgments

  The Publisher’s Circle of Coffee House Press

  About the Author

  Alone and Not Alone

  What Poem

  What poem

  were you thinking of,

  my dear,

  as you breezed out the door

  in your long coat fur-tipped

  at the top?

  What animal

  once wore that fur

  and licked it

  with a long, raspy tongue

  that lolled to one side

  in the afternoon shade?

  If only you too

  could lope across

  the Serengeti Plain

  and grab something

  in your powerful jaws,

  instead of pausing

  at the door and saying,

  as if in afterthought,

  “Write a poem

  while I’m out.”

  The Roman Numerals

  It must have been hard

  for the Romans to multiply

  —I don’t mean reproduce,

  but to do that computation.

  Step inside a roman numeral

  for a moment, a long one

  such as MDCCLIX. Look

  at the columns and pediments

  and architraves: you cannot move them,

  but how beautiful they are

  and august! However, try to multiply

  MDCCCLXIV by MCCLVIII.

  How did they do it?

  I asked this question some years ago

  and never found an answer

  because I never looked for one,

  but it is pleasant,

  living with this question.

  Perhaps the Romans weren’t good at math,

  unlike the Arabs, who arrived

  with baskets of numerals, plenty

  for everyone. We still have

  more than we need today.

  I have a 6 and a 7 that,

  when put side by side, form my age.

  Come to think of it,

  I’d rather be LXVII.

  Butterfly

  Chaung Tzu wrote about the man

  who dreamed he was a butterfly

  and when he woke up

  wondered if he weren’t now

  a butterfly dreaming he was a man.

  I love this idea

  though I doubt that Chaung Tzu

  really thought that a man would think

  he is a butterfly,

  for it’s one thing to wake up

  from a dream in the night

  and another to spend your whole life

  dreaming you are a man.

  I have spent my whole life

  thinking I was a boy, then a man,

  also a person and an American

  and a physical entity and a spirit

  and maybe a little bit butterfly.

  Maybe I should be more butterfly,

  that is, lurch into a room

  with bulging eyes and big flapping wings

  that throw a choking powder

  onto people who scream and fall dead,

  almost. For I would rescue them

  with the celestial music of my beauty

  and my utter harmlessness,

  my ætherial disregard of what they are.

  Reality

  Reality has a transparent veneer

  that looks exactly like the reality beneath it.

  If you look at anything,

  your hands, for instance, and wait,

  you will see it. Then

  it will flicker and vanish,

  though it is still there.

  You must wait a day or two

  before attempting to see it again,

  for each attempt uses up

  your current allotment of reality viewing.

  Meanwhile there is a coffee shop

  where you can sit and drink coffee,

  and where you will be tempted

  to look down at the cup and see

  the transparent veneer again,

  but that is only because you are overstimulated.

  Do not order another cup. Or do.

  It will have no effect on the veneer.
/>
  Sometimes the veneer becomes detached

  and moves slightly away from reality,

  as when you look up and see a refrigerator

  in refrigerator heaven, cold and quiet.

  But then the veneer snaps back

  to its former position and vanishes.

  This is a normal occurrence—

  do not be alarmed by it.

  Instead, drive to the store

  and buy something

  that looks like milk, return

  home and place it in the refrigerator.

  Days go by, years go by, people

  grow older and die, surrounded,

  if they are lucky, by younger people

  who do not know what to do

  with feelings whose veneers

  have slipped to the side, far

  to the side, and are staying there

  too long. But eventually they will grow hungry

  and tired, and an image of dinner and bed

  will float in like a leaf

  that fell from who knows where, and sleep.

  The Chinese Girl

  When I order a coffee that is half-real, half-decaf, with half-and-half, the women behind the counter invariably give me a blank look and wait for something to come clear in their heads, and when it doesn’t I repeat, slowly, my order, gesturing with my fingers to demonstrate the half-real, then the half-decaf part. When it finally registers on them and they fill the cup, I point to the carton of half-and-half. Then one of the two—they work in pairs—asks, “Shu gah?”

  However, the youngest of the morning crew of five understands better than the other four, so I always hope to have her wait on me, not only because of her better English but because she is the cutest. Of course not all Chinese girls look the same, but descriptions of them tend to sound the same, so I’m not sure that it would help to say that she has straight black hair, parted in the front and held in place by the bakery uniform’s light-green kerchief, a slightly flattened nose, and dark eyes, with a small mole on the right above her top lip. Her modest demeanor lends her an air of innocence. She is what, around eighteen?

  I always look forward to seeing her on my weekly visit to the bakery. This morning when I walked slowly along the display case of dazzling muffins, buns, rolls, danishes, and other pastries, trying to decide among them, I heard her voice on the other side, asking, “Can I help you?” Never before had one of the crew left the cash register area to do this.

  Concealing my surprise, I asked her, “Are the croissants ready yet?”

  “I will see.”

  When she came back from the kitchen she said, “Five minutes.”

  “Then I’ll have one of these danishes.”

  “You want small coffee, no? Half-regular, half-decaf, with half-and-half?”

  Astonished, I said, “Yes, that’s right. You have a good memory.”

  “I remember you,” she said, causing my heart to flutter. But my composure returned when she asked, “Shu gah?”

  At the register she handed me the change from a five. I took a single and, pointedly ignoring the tip jar, handed it to her, saying “This is for you. Sheh sheh.”

  “Thank you,” she said, lowering her eyes and almost imperceptibly drawing back.

  I got the signal, so I headed toward an empty table, where I removed the plastic lid from the paper cup and took a bite out of the danish. A band of steam rose from the coffee, like a curtain on a miniature stage. The Chinese girl and I are living in a remote part of China. Our past lives have been erased. She is unspeakably devoted to me and I adore her. We say little, passing our days in a state of calm I could never have imagined.

  Smudges

  Smattering of gray puffs rocks are they

  large ones but if you pick them up light

  too light but fun to lift and marvel at

  they don’t make “sense” they

  aren’t broken they are what you

  have laughing in you almost out

  smudges come out of the rock

  you breathe in and out the same gray rock

  each time as if looped in a cartoon

  of a sleeping man from whom z’s

  emanate

  Smattering of gray puffs a man is one of them

  a cloud a smudge a powder of stone

  from which a city arises with people in it

  and ideas that flow toward you and through you

  it’s too late it’s already happened to the next you

  and the gray smudge that is your face turning

  into your next face the one you forget

  as soon as it happens as you fall away

  among other smudges that are falling away

  smudges and puffs falling away

  It Takes Two

  My replacement in the universe

  is the little tyke who’ll soon arrive

  and let me be superfluous if

  and when I feel like being so.

  I don’t really mean that.

  It’s just the openness

  of what will or might be,

  when what matters most

  is the right now of now,

  which,

  when I draw back and look reveals

  an old fool in the foggy bliss

  of whatever this morning is.

  Straighten up, old thing!

  You aren’t that old and he or she

  will reach right up and grasp

  some years and break them off

  your psyche—what is it? like stardust?

  glittering on those tiny tiny fingers.

  The First Time

  The first time Marcello went outside

  the sun and moon were at his side

  (his happy mom and happy dad)

  (also the happiness known as granddad).

  The first time Marcello breathed the outside air

  he seemed to like it there.

  The first time he got in a car

  it zoomed him fast and far

  (for such a little guy)

  to Brooklyn: “Hi,

  Brooklyn!” he didn’t shout:

  his words were too little to get out.

  But clearly in his sleeping face

  he felt comfy in the human race.

  Circles

  Marcello sees

  the sun is yellow.

  But then at night

  it’s white.

  No, that’s the moon

  or a white balloon

  above his bed—

  wait, it’s his head!

  Colored circles rise and fall.

  Marcello seems to like them all.

  Grandpa Brushed His Teeth

  This morning Grandpa brushed his teeth

  so hard it knocked Marcello down

  but he got back up to watch

  Grandpa brush those teeth

  Ah Grandpa brushing up and down

  with joy he sang almost Glug glug!

  The toothpaste tasted excellent

  and the brush it zigged and zagged

  It’s a good thing he has teeth to brush

  and that he likes the brushing of them

  The only missing ones are Wisdom

  and Marcello does not need them

  And Grandpa doesn’t either

  Good-bye to Wisdom teeth and Wisdom

  Buon giorno to Marcello

  Little toothbrush fellow

  Coffee Man

  She might be hearing the burbling song of the bird outside, but it is impossible to tell, since she has rolled over and I think gone back to sleep. If I were to say quietly, “Good morning, dear, here is your coffee,” she would open her eyes and manage a groggy “Thank you.” But when she realizes that I am standing there without coffee, I would forget which tense I’m waiting to lift from the jar with the red lid in the kitchen.

  Where Is My Head?

  It makes you nervous to think not about death

  but about dying and being dead yourse
lf

  but when you don’t think about it

  it doesn’t exist,

  at least in your universe.

  And since that’s the universe you happen to be in

  you want to stay there:

  you have to fix the world

  and then save it,

  you have to do that one thing

  you can’t remember what it is

  but you know it’s there somewhere

  like the death you forgot for a moment.

  I should have spent my life

  meditating so deeply that the thought of death

  would be relaxing like a breeze or a feather

  but instead I have spent it promising myself

  that someday I would go to that special place

  in my psyche where the spirit enters and leaves

  and make my peace with the beast I call myself.

  I hate myself for dying, how

  could I have done this!

  But all I did was nothing

  other than believe that I was actually important!

  Everything my mother did proved it.

  But when she died she just glided away—

  she didn’t mind at all.

  She didn’t think she was important

  and she had a farmgirl’s view of dying:

  chickens do it all the time,

  they run around the yard with blood

  gushing from where their heads used to be.