Ron Padgett
TO THE MEMORY OF MICHAEL BROWNSTEIN
Sitting on a bench in the sun, I dozed off for a few moments, and when I
awoke I saw, out of the corner of my left eye, a dark round shape on the
ground. Some sort of animal? As I turned to look at it, it moved too. It was
the shadow of my head.
ON DECENCY
Practicing decency
is easier when you are surrounded
by cannibals who are nice to you,
nice because they are line drawings of cannibals
and you are a cannibal also
though a real one.
But when you are not a cannibal
and you are among sheep and clothespins,
no, not clothespins, those are the fingers
of those who are pinching the sheep
to keep them awake in midair,
then it is much harder
and at times seemingly pointless,
like a cement philosophy
that dead-ends on both ends.
Thus we took leave of the city
where our five senses had been compressed
into a shiny black ball rolling always just ahead of us
along with the pink ball of our mortality
and the white ball of our idea of ourselves,
as if we were moving along on the baize
of a huge billiard table.
In 1942
I took leave of my senses
and became a person
and a stone and an oaf,
but deep in my little human heart
I wanted decency,
for the tree, for all of you, and for part of me
(the oaf).
I pulled myself up through time
against the undertow of my oafishness,
as if I were holding my breath
until the day when decency would be everywhere
the way everywhere already was,
but each time I opened my eyes
the decency fled—
I saw its coattails rounding a corner
just like that.
Mother, you had decency, certainly, and father,
you did too, though sometimes it was hidden
among the smoking fragments that fly up
into heaven behind Zeus as he ascends,
and you, Grandma and Grandpa, and Grandma,
you all had decency, you always had it,
fresh off the land that has no malice in it.
I had no land, but I had you.
Ron Padgett’s How Long was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry and his Collected Poems won the LA Times Prize for the best poetry book of 2014 and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, from whom he also received the Frost medal. His translations include Zone: Selected Poems of Guillaume Apollinaire (NYRB). Seven of his poems were used in Jim Jarmusch’s film, Paterson. New York City has been his home base since 1960. “On Decency” reprinted from How Long, Coffee House Press (2011).
