Ron Padgett's many books include a collection of poems, You Never Know, and a memoir, Oklahoma Tough: My Father, King of the Tulsa Bootleggers. He is the editor of The Handbook of Poetic Forms and World Poets: An Encyclopedia for Students, as well as the translator of Blaise Cendrars’ Complete Poems. Padgett has taught imaginative writing at Columbia University and Brooklyn College, and for 20 years he was publications director of Teachers & Writers Collaborative in New York City. His poetry has received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Guggenheim Foundation, and the French government named him an Officer in the Order of Arts and Letters. His new book, from Coffee House Press, is Joe: A Memoir of Joe Brainard.

This is where it starts,
among stars on spelling tests
that include ontology
and a trip to the zoo
where an ape stares back
at you and your burning neck.
So here, rest on this sofa
and radiate yourself
into the music of thinking
about it as it happens,
and you will grow smaller and bigger
at the same time, for it
is raining hard and the rolling pin is angry
and there is great gritting
and growling, the spinach hates you,
hates you, hates you, hates you,
and the syllables of what
you would say just roll around heaven
with cotton, glue, and cardboard
representations of syntax in the eternity
that is a cave with legs.

Tarzan sinks
through the whizzing vines into the arms
of a gorgeous little gorilla (a symbol
of death but also of transfiguration and going
on without end though being dead and
sort of alive if you know what I mean).

And then in walked a truly spiritual monkey,
radiant with lack of will power and filled
with the kind of food that gets cooked
only in the mind of a great chef,
and it meant absolutely nothing.

Shadows fall over
and die.
Although wind drifts through the woods,
it sounds about half bad. I will go
into the next room and stop
splitting in half. I’m tired of being versatile.






I call my home and hear
my own voice in my ear
telling me I’m not there.

I take the comb and comb
my hair straight up like flames
surrounding shots of lurid dames.

It’s a decal, that’s all,
stuck on the window of a car
that went too far and hit

the perfect image of itself.
It sits now on a shelf
in the museum of Who You Are.

© Ron Padgett 2006

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