6 Prose Poems
Poetry by Eve Joseph. Illustrations by Andrea Bennett
We met at a birthday party. You were the only rum drinker in the room. On the couch, Al Purdy was going on about the stunted trees in the Arctic. Upon closer examination, we could see that the leaves were tiny parkas. The illogical must have a logic of its own you said. The first two drinks don’t count, it’s the third that blows the door open. With every gust of wind the little coats raised their arms and waved shyly at us. You were a new music, something I had not heard before. As they used to say about that Estonian composer: he only had to shake his sleeves and the notes would fall out.
The rain has stopped and the sky has cleared. My husband is downstairs chatting with Milosz who is chopping vegetables for dinner. I can’t make out the words, only the swell of the sea and those two soldiers rowing. Milosz is wearing my apron and drink- ing my wine. The tide has come in, erasing the muddy footprints and the sign for Help carved in the sand. How do we ever return? How is it possible? I’m told a massive tree flourishes in the heart of the favela, like the pink lungs of a coal miner. He puts the oar down and caresses me with his calloused hands. He knows who he is. Not the cook; the other one.
You are floating on your back in the salt water. A little cork bobbing in the waves. A moment of infinity, brief but intense. Or, you are trying to imagine yourself as an old woman getting on a bus in Aarhus and feeling beautiful for no particular reason. Or, you are searching for a Danish poet only to find, when you look him up, that he is a pathologist. You think poets and pathologists probably have a great deal in common. Engaged, as they both are, in the peculiar and the wonder-like. Which in the Danish — underligt — means exactly the same thing.
Another day in paradise read the sign on the café door. The ocean adzed in sunlight. Soup simmering on the stove. At a corner table, Breton was arguing with Artaud about a fly in the water pitcher. One wanted to fish it out, one wanted to let it drown. I shit on Marxism, said the madman to the surrealist. It was Wednesday. A local improv group was about to perform. One of the actors sat down at a white piano in an imaginary asylum. The audience loved the idea of madness but recoiled at language that glistened like a weapon.
People who suffer from boanthropy believe they are cows. In the morning, when the dew is still on the grass, they head out to graze. The farmer thinks of them as a herd but they see themselves as a congregation. The Jerseys welcome all newcomers with rich buttermilk biscuits while the Holsteins hold tight to their Lutheran roots and minister from their pulpits in the barn. Tired of all things human, these people crawl on all fours like Nebuchadnezzar in the stubbled fields outside of Babylon. A motorist, assuming they are searching for something lost, abandons his car and joins the search. Soon he too is lowing and swishing his tail in the tall grass. As with all recent converts, he is zealous. When the farmer shoos him away from the flowerbeds he charges, head down, baseball cap flying into the water trough.
In our basement, the wringer washer barked like a baby seal. Strangers showed up with offerings of raw fish wrapped in news- paper. My mother thanked them and started giving weekly reports on the pup’s progress. Brigitte Bardot sent a handwritten note on perfumed stationery applauding the rescue effort and chiding Sophia Loren for wearing fur. In the end, it got out of hand and my mother told the strangers, who had become her dearest friends, she had released the seal into the ocean. Look, she said, pointing to a bald head bobbing in the grey waves, he looks just like Gandhiji without his glasses on.
From the forthcoming collection, Quarrels.