There does seem to be, in recent years, a re-emergence
of interest in prose poem.
There are several new prose poem magazines out there,
and I see prose poems now in all kinds of magazines
where I didn't see them for a while, sort
of the second moment for the prose poem in my life.
In the '70s, Russell Edson and WS Merwin,
and lots of the poets that we know
from the period we're writing whole books of prose poems
and bringing different influences in,
surrealist influences, to the poetry.
I think what's happening now is a little different, a little
more meditative, and I think the essay
is beginning to impinge on the prose poem more than a fable.
But something else is happening right now,
or has been happening for a while,
there are writers and editors talking about the lyric essay
and exactly where the prose poem leaves off
and the lyrics essay begins, I don't know.
When I think I've written some lyric essays that I think
are not prose poems, I think in the end
it's the writer and the reader who make
those decisions separately.
Doesn't matter.
But I'm going to read what I think of as a literary essay
from Taboo.
One section of the book is a series
of these small, dissociative essays.
You won't find a thesis at the end
of the first paragraph.
It's called "Chaos".
"They were once the flesh and bone
of him, our beloved friend.
Of course, the flesh and bones were not good, even when alive.
I rubbed the ashes, gritty white and gray granules
firmly between my fingers.
Their edges could draw blood.
I leaned to say goodbye, said goodbye,
kissed the lips I kissed so many times,
especially the last six days when friends and family sat
around the clock talking and holding his hands,
massaging his limbs.
His eyes grew larger as he diminished,
the skin retracting, his gray hair and beard taking
on prominence.
I thought his face, with features model simplified,
the perfect form like the face of Peter in frescoes by Giotto.
I felt that inner distancing with such a thought.
I told no one.
But once he was dead, Gary and I got the call just before 11:00
in the morning and reached his bed in 20 minutes.
There was no presence in that flesh, just some powerful sense
he was nearby, and so I spoke my final words to the flesh, held
his hand, kissed his lips, his forehead,
but felt my sentences taking up elsewhere
around the body in the air.
So all the fuss of how to dispose of the ashes, all
the ceremony we created.
Brilliant, flowered wrapping paper cut into squares
and folded into palm sized envelopes, the ashes
in an aluminum bowl laid on the ground on a bright red kitchen
cloth just off the aspen trail up in the grove he loved.
August, the leaves dull gold.
Now the clouds closed in over our heads
above the towering treetops.
The mountaintop, a mile in the air at the Northeast
edge of Tucson up a winding 25 mile road in five cars
with all our dogs.
His partner and a dozen of his closest friends
holding hands in a circle taking turns telling stories.
A passing of the bowl and silver serving spoon,
each scooping some of the coarse, tiny, human shards.
The hollow scudding sound as the ashes
slid into the flowery envelopes.
The human circle breaking finally,
like slow atoms of a single molecule
spreading randomly into the woods,
finding places to scatter the ashes,
and then one-by-one returning to the circle, the molecules,
atoms rejoining in a new configuration.
One friend tucked her envelope of ashes into her purse,
a portion was set aside for his partner to bury in their garden
before she held out for family in New York
where he was born, a minor fragmentation,
a temporary holding of slow concentrations
to be dispersed elsewhere, which left me oddly unsettled.
I know no concentration endures, human or otherwise.
Things do fall apart, scattered like discarded
domestic objects.
A one port stainless steel pot from a wedding set
in which a wife cooked a portion of her first household meals
becomes one of many gifts when her son sets up
his first apartment then college,
becomes a gift again years later when
the son-- no longer single-- buys with his partner
their first matched cookware, the odds and ends
from their families and thrift store student pasts set off
to a charity's secondhand outlet except the one, the pot that
was his mother's, which he held back save for the day
he could give it to someone else, a new young friend,
a poet who lives on air and spring.
I see the pot when I visit him in the kitchen
of his new apartment.
We're discussing a villanelle by Elizabeth Bishop,
which opens "the art of losing is not hard to master".
He lifts the pot from the flame.
He's made a vegetable sauce that needs to cool for dinner later,
and much to my horror plonks it directly into the freezer.
Last week on our back porch at dusk,
this young man blurted a little in his cups from whiskey
and sevens and apropos of what I don't recall.
I read about chaos theory.
It only takes 10 years for the piss you flushed yesterday
to come full circle.
The molecules disperse they spread out all over the world,
then one morning you turn the faucet
and some of those molecules fall right out
in your drinking water.
No.
How is that chaos?
I wanted to protest, also a little in my cups.
He had startled by my sudden motion.
How's that chaos when they return
to us as something else?"