Alone and Not Alone

Ron Padgett

• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781566894012
• eBook ISBN: 9781566894029
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Following Pulitzer Prize finalist Ron Padgett's 2013's Collected Poems (winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the William Carlos Williams Prize) Alone and Not Alone offers new poems that see the world in a clear and generous light.

From "The World of Us":

Don't go around all day
thinking about life—
doing so will raise a barrier
between you and its instants.
You need those instants
so you can be in them,
and I need you to be in them with me
for I think the world of us
and the mysterious barricades
that make it possible.

It All Depends

Que reste-t-il de nos amours?

—CHARLES TRENET

Et nos amours, faut-il qu’il m’en souvienne?

—APOLLINAIRE

But it is not love that I would speak of

for as you see, I am of

the nineteenth century, when love was

. . . well, it all depends,

and I can’t get out of it,

whatever this love is.

I will die in it and I hope

of it, it is the preamble

to walking in and sitting

down and saying “Hi”

before anything else has a chance

to happen. And then

of course nothing does,

which is why you keep saying it—

you can’t get out

of saying it. So you may as well

take off your hat and stay a while,

which is what you always planned on anyway.

The nineteenth century,

what a tremendous thing

to be in love in!

Cottages go by

and music piles up

like excited dead people.

They stop but don’t,

like sleeping people who are alive,

but it’s not that easy,

the century is more complicated

than one had expected

now that everyone has a pot and a pan

but not a love of the pot and the pan.

Still, look at those sailing ships

on the wide main and the stairways

that spiral into heaven

and that bird with a long red beard

sticking straight up!

It’s our chance to separate ourselves

into numerous pieces and have them

go in different directions,

reassembling what time had dispersed

in the form of granules and mist.

Or was it even really there?

A nightingale warbled

the tune it was supposed to

so the world would calm down.

There’s nothing wrong with resting

alongside this shady rill and taking medications

as if they were piles of stones placed at intervals

by people who must have had a meaning

in mind but with no thought of telling you

what it was, for they didn’t know that you

would exist. Therefore, lie down and rest.

The afternoon is mild and your love

is not driving you crazy, temporarily.

A rest might give you the strength

to look love straight in the eye

and not fade into granules and mist.

Reverdy said

“One must try to live”—

the statement of a man

who didn’t love

or wasn’t loved

enough. A small rectangle

of light lay on his floor

and his shoe

flashed as it went by.

His wife was hidden

in the kitchen, his girlfriend

hidden in celebrity,

his God just hidden.

Pierre opened the kitchen door,

the trap door of fame,

and the side of the cathedral,

but there was nothing there,

and when he opened his heart

he found only a rectangle

of sunlight on the floor.

But it was enough.

Perhaps his wife was hiding

her love in the kitchen,

the dark kitchen in Solesmes,

where I saw her walking

briskly down the street

at the age of 97 or 98,

the same street

a few years later

she would move slowly up

and down the way

to lie down in the tomb

next to Pierre, her Pierre.

By then the girlfriend

had twirled into Eternity,

and God had hidden so deeply

in Pierre’s poems

Pierre didn’t know

He was there—

He had gone back and disappeared

beneath the period

that ended Pierre’s first book,

like a dark glint.

But God too was trying to live.

He hasn’t been around lately,

which is perhaps why

the landscape is so cheerful—

it gets to be just itself,

brutally wonderfully so, and birds

veer and chirp and lift

their wings to see what’s there.

It’s air.

And so singing.

“But that’s what I did,”

says Pierre

out of nowhere.

“And you can’t tell

if the singing made the air

or the other way around—

or both, which is most likely.”

And then, like a Frenchman,

he left, before I had a chance

to throw him around the room,

but with respect,

affection, and mountains,

the kind they had in the century

he was born in, mountains as black

as his tomb, which I am unable

to throw around now

that his wife’s in there too.

Henriette: her name.

(Henri: his real first name.)

(Her name a little feminine version of h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Dedication
• Contents
• 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
• Alone and Not Alone
• Funder Acknowledgments
• The Publisher’s Circle of Coffee House Press
• About the Author