Prose poems sometimes seem to me a question of the line, although
this sounds utterly banal.  Sometimes I find my line getting longer
and longer and then it turns into prose although it's still a poem.
As time has gone on I have no idea how this langauge differentiates
itself from "proper" prose, except as a puzzle of length (is Marquez'
The Autumn of the Patriach a poem? and some of James Kelman's short
short stories seem more like poems than anything else, although they
are printed as stories.)

I wrote a short series of prose poems loosely inspired by Goya's
Caprices a while back, they are really little fables I suppose; I'll
paste them below.

Best

A

On the death of god


In the age of barbed wire, they announced the death of god.
Everything was absolutely modern.  Great men traced the flyspots on
ancient walls and studied the mutations of pollen. Never before was
so much knowledge gathered together.

Nevertheless, they forgot to examine the dirt at their feet which
was, as it always has been, full of god.  And a huge emptiness began
to be apparent.  They thought that if they stepped on the moon, the
cancer would retreat.  They thought if they invented washing
machines, the asylums would empty.  They thought if they wrote enough
books, the poor would disappear.  But nothing worked.  They became
more and more afraid, and ordered inventories of their armouries.

To combat their anxiety, they wooed the drug barons of Burma and
Columbo, the warlords of Somalia and Bosnia, the despots of Indonesia
and Chile and China, the generals and sheiks of the Middle East.
Many were photogenic and drew huge ratings, and white opium clouds
soothed the people.  But still they had forgotten god.

In the East, where god had been banished forever, the Pope rose out
of the stills of the dispossessed and boxed the ears of the Kremlin.
As they watched, a giant crow landed on the steps of the Parliament
and plucked out the eyes of the onlookers.

With a new fear, they began to understand that god had never gone
away.  His transactions passed all understanding.  Not a sparrow
fell, but he sold it.  He suffered the little children to come to his
wars, and his dogmas issued from all the world's leaders.  His
bridges and factories and powerstations marched over the land, and
virgin forests fell prostrate before him.  His mansions towered over
the hovels of the poor.  The electronic nerves of every economy led
to his bottomless stomach.  And already it was too late.


The beast


The beast flies in the wind.

He is absolute in his fear.  All myths, legends, tales, histories,
rumours and superstitions cluster on his back.

We have seen him as a dark speck in the sunset on clear afternoons
and pointed him out to our children.  They regard him with a distant
curiosity.

It must be admitted that he is decorative in the smoke and fire of
the oil refinery.  He gives a certain elan to the skyline.  When he
comes down to feed in the great houses of the land there is a flurry
of obsequies and the presses stammer everywhere, shaking the earth.

It is true, nevertheless, that even the great cannot look him in the
eye.  He is a master of all language. The truth shrivels to whimsy in
his gaze.  He juggles ideas like baubles and the crowds gather,
shouting and cheering.  Children creep out of the shadows and watch,
hypnotised and afraid, as his breath ignites the meadows of their
innocence.  The young men shake their fists and turn machineguns on
the crowd, but no one notices.

The odd thing is that no one can remember what he looks like.  His
identikit picture illuminates our televisions but it merely resembles
everybody else.  Comedians lean towards their audiences, suspecting
he is concealed in the raucous laughter.  Old men lie in soiled beds
and imagine they are consuming his ground remains in the pap spooned
into their ruined mouths.  Mothers cry out in their dreams.  But
everyone remains convinced that once they saw him, if only they could
remember where.  On a stage wearing a false moustache.  Riding a
white horse over a road gravelled with ashen bones.  He chucked a
swaddled baby under its chin.  He stood on the pipelines and yelled
for more.  He held a pen in an ornate building and bent towards the
microphone.  All his life, Goya attempted his likeness.

The current argument is that he doesn't exist.  But we have all seen
him. And we all know how difficult it is, in the smoke and drift of
dreams, to find reliable witnesses.  How small people are! How petty!
How they crouch over their miserable campfires, howling for home!
For they imagine that if they find their homes, he will be there
cooking a hot supper and warming towels.  If they looked up, they
could see his belly trawling the air, gross, stinking, endlessly
inflatable.  But how is an ant to look at a mountain?  And how to
avoid his eyes?

It is, of course, an immense problem.  Such voyagers as we have sent
out come back with partial reports, if they return at all, and there
are fewer and fewer volunteers.  As science expands, our task is
hammered down to arithmetic.  Our wings are furnished with lead.  Our
vision is reduced to conundrums of optics.  Our speech is a mess of
splinters.  Nevertheless, it is time to begin again, to plunge
unwisely over this unidentifiable cliff into the many-coloured wind
that buffets us with the voices of the dead.




--



Alison Croggon
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