No better way to transition into a new year than by a batch of Russell Edson prose poems along with some medieval art. Enjoy!
THE WOUNDED BREAKFAST
A huge shoe mounts up from the horizon, squealing and grinding forward on small wheels, even as a man sitting to breakfast on his veranda is suddenly engulfed in a great shadow, almost the size of the night...
He looks up and sees a huge shoe ponderously mounting out of the earth.
Up in the unlaced ankle-part an old woman stands at a helm behind the great tongue curled forward; the thick laces dragging like ships' rope on the ground as the huge thing squeals and grinds forward; children everywhere, they look from the shoelace holes, they crowd about the old woman, even as she pilots the huge shoe over the earth...
Soon the huge shoe is descending the opposite horizon, a monstrous snail squealing and grinding into the earth...
The man turns to his breakfast again, but sees it's been wounded, the yolk of one of his eggs is bleeding...
THE LOVE AFFAIR
One day a man fell in love with himself, and was unable to think of anything but himself.
Of course he was flattered, no one had ever shown him that much interest...
He wanted to know all about himself, his hobbies, his likings in music and sports.
He was jealous he had not known himself as a child. He wanted to know what kind of a boy he had been...
When asked if he thought it would lead to marriage, he said that that was his fondest wish, that he longed to have babies with himself...
A ZOOGRAPHY
A man had a herd of miniature elephants. They were like wads of gray bubble gum; their trumpeting like the whistling teakettles...
Also, he had a box of miniature cattle. When they lowed at sunset it was like the mewing of kittens...
He liked to stampede them on his bed...
In his closet a gigantic moth the size of a dwarf...
ON THE EATING OF MICE
A woman was roasting a mouse for her husband's dinner; then to serve it with a blueberry in its mouth.
At table he uses a dentist's pick and a surgeon's scalpel, bending over the tiny roasting with a jeweler's loupe...
Twenty years of this: curried mouse; garlic and butter mouse; mouse sautéed in its own fur; Salisbury mouse; mouse-in-the-trap, baked in the very trap that killed it; mouse tartare; mouse poached in menstrual blood at the first moon...
Twenty years of this, eating their way through the mice.. And yet, not to forget, each night one less vermin in the world...
YOU
Out of nothing there comes a time called childhood, which is simply a path leading through an archway called adolescence. A small town there, past the arch called youth.
Soon, down the road, where one almost misses the life lived beyond the flower, is a small shack labeled, you.
And it is here the future lives in the several postures of arms on windowsill, cheek on this; elbows on knees, face in the hands; sometimes the head thrown back, eyes staring into the ceiling...This into nothing down the long day's arc...
Russell Edson (1935-2014) with wife Francis in their backyard on Weed Avenue in Stamford, Connecticut.
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