The Prose Poem
I enjoy writing in formal patterns, for the sheer fun of it. It’s like constructing an Airfix model, the poem as gadget, or puzzle. Having a form to work with or against gives you a grid reference that locates you within a tradition. The Sonnet, Terza Rima, a chain of Couplets or Quatrains, Blank Verse, all have their rules, and customs, predecessors and inherited expectations. Right away you have something you can play with, a technical thing you can tinker with and treat as a formal exercise in the absence of any genuine inspiration. And sometimes, what starts as a formal exercise, accretes meaning until it reaches a critical density where a real poem gets switched on, and the thing becomes energised. All of this by way of introduction to the sequence of poems below, which are prose poems. They gave me tremendous difficulties, precisely because of their lack of objective structure. When there are no restraints on how a thing can be said, how do you say it? Anyone who has made a sustained attempt at writing, be it poetry or fiction, will have experienced that bewildered paralyses that can grip you when faced with the infinite array of things that can be said and the infinite ways in which it can be articulated. Commit yourself to even half a line, and your loss in terms of the unsaid is consequently infinite. It’d better be a damn good half-line, in fact, it would need to be the One True and Radiant Line. Form is Justification. It is a simplistic quip, but it has a psychological truth. It is easier to feel you are making the correct choices when writing a Sonnet, than when battling against the sense of psychic dispersal that is the consequence of too much freedom. Prose is so much more difficult to navigate across. The sequence below was intended to be a big hefty piece of prose, with huge paragraphs moving forward with cumulative weight. Like 19th Century prose. However, as I wrote, I got lost, so I rewrote, chipping away, making the prose more jagged, trying to get it to follow more precisely the contours of something I hoped was underlying, something it could adhere to. The process became lapidary, and the result something of a prose mosaic.
101 Ella Street
1.
A resonant wooden staircase. Woodgrain polished by footsoles, iron nail heads, wrinkled drippings of yellow paint;
Dust in the corners: mineral grit from burst insulation, crumbled plaster;
Dead woodlice.
Then the attic itself, it’s floor at eye-level broad as a ship’s deck.
It amplifies the sound of his footsteps as he walks across to where a mirror stands propped against a pile of old suitcases.
Once again he conducts the enigmatic experiment of simply looking into the mirror for a long, long time,
Saying his name,
Trying to grasp the co-ordinates of his birth.
2.
My earliest memory is unearthly, composed of dust, white noise, and voices of congratulation: the grainy, televised images and the radio communications of the Apollo Moon Mission.
I can recall only the descent, the lunar module settling into it’s own disturbance like an awkward crustacean.
I was sitting in a chair beside the window, which overlooked the garden. My mother knelt beside the chair and pointed through the window to the actual moon. It hung directly above the shaggy, dark mass of our weeping willow, which gathered and loosened, in the long, slow pulses of the wind.
Can you see them? She asked.
I tried, but could see no sign of the landing craft, which had loomed, magnified, in our television.
3.
A street in Hanoi, the day after the Tet Offensive.
A man who has his hands tied behind his back is being shoved along stumbling by a South Vietnamese General.
They are accompanied by a crowd, and a camera crew.
They stop.
The General steps forward. With the tip of a pistol he places a small hole, instantly ringed with a scorch mark, in one side of the man’s head.
The General steps back.
The executed man is dead on his feet. Blood issues in long, collapsing loops from the bullet wound in his temple, and he reacts with mouth-movements to the disruption taking place behind his eyes, which remain open.
He has become a strange kind of fish.
Then his nervous system shuts down, and the body falls forward onto it’s face.
4.
We lived at 101 Ella Street, Bloomfield, New Jersey. Our house, two stories overlooking a ground level garage, sat back from the street. Twenty or so concrete steps led up to it’s front porch. You entered through a screen door of fine wire mesh, then through another door of frosted glass patterned with clear flowers.
Inside, the porch resembled a ship’s bridge stripped of it’s instrumentation, or the whitewashed, timber wheelhouse of a boat.
The surf of distant traffic would linger in it’s wall cavities, like the distant decay of rain.
In the intermissions, the sound of your own breathing, close, and the detailed sounds of your own wet mouth.
In the early evenings of summer my mother would sit out here and paint, or, with all the big windows swung open, speak with Anna, creaking back and forth on her rocking chair on the porch next door.
Blue space, friendly, over the roof tops.
The talk is of local things, close to hand: Anna admiring one of my mother’s roses, and saying so.
Yes.
It was bright yellow fringed with red, and the wasps it attracted had black backs, golden ribs, and strange, magnetic flight paths.
They were the things themselves.
I should have studied them for what they were.
5.
Memory is at it’s most involuntary during sickness; membranes weaken and let through, partitions grow translucent.
Sickbeds are linked across time by abreaction.
The tinkling of a wind-chime, heard through an open window, welds two autumn nights, decades apart, together into one…
When sick, I always remember my original bedroom at 101 Ella Street: a Mickey Mouse alarm clock ticking on the bedside table, a Vicks Vap-O-Rub machine wheezing friendly, medicinal clouds of steam.
Whatever I wanted I could have. New books, new toys.
I suffered badly and often from bronchitis as a child; it felt as if stalactites were forming and bristling in my lungs. Only concentrated, shallow breathing, as if I were a sheet of water in a pan, avoided the hurt.
I lay in bed and heard the day outside roll onwards, with it’s gear-changes, breezes, heel-taps and Bluejays impinging through glass.
On the wall opposite my bed stood my desk and bookcase. Certain valued items were arranged neatly on the desk: a large, plastic bodied microscope, a small metal one, a small safe with genuine combination lock, two walkie-talkies, and my fossil collection, a boxed set bought from the New York Museum of Natural History.
If I remember correctly, this collection consisted of:
– a shark’s tooth, black and stony at the root, it’s cutting surfaces a pale grey lined with darker, mineralised cracks;
– a limestone Brachiopod;
– a solid cluster of octagonal or hexagonal plant stems, snapped and revealing a cross-section;
– the ghost of a fish;
– an unassuming spiral shell, of sedimentary rock.
The rest, ironically, I forget, but in addition I had a number of large slates. When split apart along their layers these revealed fern imprints of such photographic detail that even the most delicate veins could be seen.
6.
What I really want to talk about is the Firefly.
And the Praying Mantis.
To my mind, neither of these are merely insects. They are significations.
The Firefly is indicative of that which lies beyond words, and which you can barely catch. The instant you arrive it is gone, and all you are left with is a trace of light behind the eyes, the scent of the cherry tree under which you are standing, and the wild exuberance of subsequent hermeneutics.
Night after night under the electric desk-lamp, joyful and grateful neverthless.
The Praying Mantis is a Zen Koan, a serrated paradox, a mystic with a knife. It is a 14th Century depiction of Death, scythe cradled in it’s arms, standing enveloped in a Nirvana hush.
And it’s mind is a drop of clear, poisonous liquid.
It marries and deanimates the word, rendering it a headless, mechanical stalk powered by ideational reflexes.
I knew of a man in Bloomfield who kept a pet Praying Mantis leashed at the neck by a small collar and fine silver chain to his bottom bedpost, where it would perch at night.
I thought he must be very strange to want to sleep under the gaze of that predator.
At the foot of my bed had always been stationed the Angel Gabriel himself, to guard against nightmares and monsters and a water stain on the ceiling, which had the profile of a giant, and whose pounding footsteps were my frightened heartbeats.
But things get complicated, and we can’t always select our muse.
7.
There is the idea of the thing, and speculation concerning the thing.
Then there is the thing itself.
If I fully attend to the thing itself, until my whole head disappears and I become simple and clear as a lense, will I be able to speak?
Without falsifying?
But if I attend one micron above the plane of focus, then language shimmers and plays in the interval.
As if, at best, it were a field or halo generated by the thing itself.
Like a Paramecium, brightly lit from below, hunting silently behind a slip cover…
Shout as loud as you can.
They won’t hear you.
Because language no longer concurs with you: it’s propulsions are suddenly so different.
It goes off, on it’s own.
When it comes back, it never really does.
‘Goodnight’ and ‘I love you’ never again sound the way they used to.
8.
Infinitesimal, glinting metals on the rim of comprehension; sleep-grains of the Sandman; boulders of dust dislodged under the bed by the monster’s careful breathing; moon-minerals, resettling; nights that I lay awake straining to hear the message until my whole body became an
[ear]
a booming listening!
Signals from beyond the farthest sills, the windows’ and the horizons’
And the night-awareness of a child.
9.
My parents bedroom. The room you were not allowed in.
But only this room had air-conditioning.
The entire bottom half of one window was taken up by a machine. With an other-worldly whoosh this machine would create fresh, dry air in the midst of even the muggiest summer’s day.
It marked the division between time and eternity, between hot play, activity and blur, and rest, reflection and taxonomy.
I would sit in front of it’s metal grill, ands peer into it’s workings where I could see ice precipitate out of the day.
It was a domestic model of the quantum void, a Valhalla for dead flies.
Beyond the rotating veil of it’s fan you could see the street, micro-sectioned into harder, fiercer outlines as if by a strobelight.
The Zachino’s Pontiac, our oak tree, Kathy Abar riding past on her Schwinn bicycle with it’s yellow, wire frame basket.
And once, on 11 July 1968, a hurrying man from Western Union.
So, yes: as to the destinies of flies, men, and virtual particles, even from this perspective they are impossible to predict, and brief.
10.
Berkeley Elementary, my school, was at the top of Ella Street but on the other side of Main Street. You crossed over each morning under the watchful eyes of a warden.
It was a large, redbrick building with a white wooden belltower, but they never rang the old iron bell. Instead, pupils were summoned to morning assembly by the panic of small electric bells fixed to the walls of the corridors. Each class would line up behind it’s teacher in the auditorium to pledge allegiance o the flag, which was trooped onto the stage along with the school flag. Then the national anthem would be sung, after which each class would go to it’s room and there observe the one-minute silence.
I was an indifferent pupil, and remember nothing of the actual lessons. The only thing I do recall learning is how to tie my shoe laces.
Far more interesting to me were the Terrapins and the Angelfish we kept as class pets.
The Terrapins had chiselled, geometric heads and precision engineered shells. I took delight in examining just how well made they were, noting in particular the integrity of the seams bonding the shell plates together.
The architectonics of this creature cried out to be handled, held in the palm of the hand like an organic fob-watch.
The element of puzzle involved in their construction, in the configuration of shell plates on the carapace, hinted at a meeting, and seemed to encode a grammar the rules of which were hidden within or behind the creature itself.
In nature, or in God.
It doesn’t make sense, to an eight year old, that a thing might not have a meaning. It is self-evident to a child that there are languages other than those of man. Matter, as Bishop Berkeley wrote, is one of the languages of God.
An explanation never really fits. How many times have you heard a child say ‘yes, but…’ after an explanation has been given to him or her concerning something?
An explanation always leaves behind the thing it purports to explain, it never takes the thing with it.
The child’s attention stays with the thing, hence the “yes, but..”
Each thing is its own idiolect, lucid and replete in itself and in the comprehension of God, but an enigma to us, whose language reflexes are exclusive.
We are in a certain sense illiterate because of our languages.
11.
Jewelled and weightless, mouthing prayers composed solely of the purest vowels, the angelfish swam in a world weirdly distorted and crowded with eyes, as if the aquarium were the throne room of Revelations IV.
It was life with an artificial hue, tinted with eschatological metals.
The mind ached trying to take it in.
Tiny adhesive snails travelled on the walls of the tank, scouring the glass for algae. Air, expansive and invisible in our world, rose silver and discrete in theirs, globular, shivering and wobbling the fronds.
Lesser fish, colourless as if embryonic, darted avoiding the angelfish. On bright days the thread lines of their guts could be seen, and the granular darkness of their hearts.
One Monday morning we arrived to find the bitten, ragged carcass of one of the angelfish floating upside down in the tank. It was white-eyed, and seeped an oily residue, which spread as a film on the water’s surface.
The angelfish, it turned out, were killers. They were cannibals.
We stood round the aquarium and starred at those breathing fissures of light with a fresh sense of horror.
Which is, after all, a kind of renewal.
12.
One of my favourite activities at school, during the free time, when there were no lessons being taught and we were left to our own devices, was the plotting out of mazes on 5 millimetre graph paper.
I had a rival and partner in this, a girl whose name I no longer remember but who sat across the table from me in the library. We would exchange and try out on each other examples of our work.
I wanted to design a maze that was successively stunning in its cruel and florid ramifications, one that would leave the seeker stumbling like a tranced calf along glittering corridors where torches cast a pantomime and dripping water is amplified and scary…
Certain rules were applied to achieve this result:
1. As many paths as possible should terminate as near as possible to the Central Chamber. Dead-ends should ideally be separated from the Central Chamber by the thickness of a mere pen-stroke, or be situated in the Central Chamber’s immediate vicinity. Failure should be acute, on the verge of success: the realisation that you must have committed a wrong choice at some stage during the journey should occur in the final instant, after the delusive belief that the goal is about to be attained.
2. Mistakes made upon entering the maze should have effects that snowball: a law of inverse proportion should be one of the principles governing the maze’s structure, and the One True Path grow remote and subliminal as a molecular chain, a thread of DNA.
3. There should be multiple entrances.
4. There should be no One True Path.
5. Instead, there should be a multiplicity of false paths. When edited and travelled upon in correct combinative order, these will in retrospect constitute the One True Path.
6. The Central Chamber should not be located at the centre.
Anywhere but, in fact.
I wish I’d kept these mazes, they constituted a proto-poetic oeuvre I have not equalled since.
13.
But then it was August, with its leafsmell and its blood cherries, and its constellations in league with the quietude of the maple; and I was running, through the gardens: Graziano’s, the Zachino’s, the Abar’s because it was evening and everything was an occurrence, a simple exposure to cooling sky.
Awareness, spacious, it’s twin co-ordinates the pulse of blood at my temple and the intermittant signals of a
firefly,
there orbiting under the eaves of the maple, it’s chemico-mystical intestines fuelled by the darkness that every child wonders at: the darkness before his birth; the darkness behind his Now: and the darkness out of which his thinking about darkness emerges as he spins round to catch himself on the brink of…
14.
I wanted to become a palaeontologist, and dig dinosaur bones in Arizona. Because I had rights which were being ignored, and I would never get to see a live Triceratops.
Or a Struthiomimius of the Late Cretaceous period, an elegant bird-like dinosaur that once inhabited the grassy plains of central North America.
And which evolved and vanished like a biological tornado millions of years before I was born.
But who was to blame? No-one. Just a law of mutability operant in every detail, jiggling grains of sand, photographing victims in slate and in limestone, rotting our dog back into earth under our weeping willow.
Sometimes, as when lying awake in bed on a hot June night after a thunderstorm had refreshed the atmosphere and constellations sparkled
The silence of things gone would infiltrate the trees,
Or cluster round the chime of a metal gate, and linger in the footsteps of someone walking alone down Ella Street.
So I conceived of a heaven that was open and democratic: every species would be there, any creature that had ever succumbed wholly to the past tense.
From Samantha, our dog, to the Struthiominmus of the Late Cretaceous period.
And all would have the power of speech.
I even imagined how we would enter this kingdom. First a lightbulb, just one, would expire with a glassy ping, the after image of it’s internal wiring like the snapshot of an insect.
And then another one close by.
And then another.
Until a rustling as of locusts incrementally deleted the New York suburbs, and swept inwards
And even the billboards in Times Square began to shower.
Then silence, as the last querulous hoot of a car horn faded.
Exposure.
As if the soul were a ceramic thing, the ground of life a cold stone floor.
Objects would start exploding into dense, molecular clouds of primary colours, the way television screens might explode in a Walt Disney carton: millions of little dots, liberated, mixing in slow motion.
The laws of fluid mechanics would briefly hold, then give way under pressure from the miraculous as forms began to cohere and glow.
And the first man to step forth, studying his hands in wonder, would be Hugh Coyle, who I last saw lying in a glossy dark wood box in a funeral parlour in downtown Bloomfield.
Then others: men, women, children, rubbing their eyes, laughing;
Bluejays, fireflies, terrapins, with their chiselled geometric heads and precision engineered shells, salamanders, with their highly reactive skins still sizzling;
Hallucagenia, Opabinia, Struthiomimus,
And our dog, Samantha;
Each achieving gem-like resolution, as if the principle of individuation had taken on a microscopic focus:
The soundless division of bacterium like the parting of continents;
Triceratops,
Huge and pristine, and detailed as the tiniest steel green beetle compact and aglow in a crevice of bark on the trunk of a reconstructed oak.
