John Rieffel's Web Page

(Some Selected Prose Poems of Russell Edson)

Soup Song

How I make my soup: I draw water from a tap...

I am not an artist. And the water is not so much drawn as allowed to fall, and to capture itself in a pot.

Perhaps not so much captured, as allowed to gather itself from its stream; the way it falls that the drain would have it.

But in this case a normal path interrupted by a pot; for which soup is the outcome of all I do...

Antimatter

One the other side of a mirror there's an inverse world, where the insane go sane; where bones climb out of the earth and recede to the first slime of love.

An in the evening the sun is just rising.

Lovers cry because they are a day younger, and soon childhood robs them of their pleasure.

In such a world there is much sadness which, of course, is joy...


Auden, The Shield of Achilles
Eliot, Preludes
Meredith, The Jain Bird Hospital in Dehli
Muldoon, Cauliflower
Rich, The Burning of Paper instead of Children
Strand, Eating Poetry
Szymborska, Slapstick
Szymborska, Warning