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Night Jump
At night Chinamen jump
on Asia with a thump
Who but Frank O'Hara
could have written that?
and then gone on to speak of
love and something he calls grace.
To start out so funny
and end up with mystery and grace—
we should all be so lucky.
Mir
There is no synonym for synonym.
In the shtetl,
only the crowing
of two cocks
that sound alike.
I bang into the water pail,
blue in the morning light,
though to tell the truth
I am blue in any light,
a powdery royal blue.
Our village does not fly
through the air—it is
nailed to the ground
and we hold on for dear life—
to each other, to the trees,
the cottage doors, whatever,
and we sing our local ditty:
O the cats and the wellsprings!
O the dogs and the birdbath!
O! O! O!
Poems
© Ron Padgett 2004. All rights reserved.
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Photo courtesy Ulla Montan
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Ron
Padgett’s books include New & Selected Poems; Great
Balls of Fire; The Straight Line: Writings on Poetry and Poets;
Blood Work: Selected Prose; and, most recently, You
Never Know (poems) and Oklahoma Tough: My Father, King
of the Tulsa Bootleggers (a memoir). He is the editor of a
three-volume reference series entitled World Poets and
the translator of Blaise Cendrars’ Complete Poems.
In addition to grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim
Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the
American Academy of Arts and Letters, in 2001 Padgett was made
an Officer in the Order of Arts and Letters by the French
Ministry of Culture and Communication. In the fall of 2004 Coffee
House Press will issue his Joe: A Memoir of Joe
Brainard. For more information, go to www.ronpadgett.com
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