THREE PROSE POEMS
by Joseph Young

APHORISMS

Repose

There is no rest in the silver cup of the desert. How will you sleep without the bony lips of the trout beseeching God?

Extremity

Three things fall from the edge of the world: the old wind, the dust from the bottom of your shoes, the nails that hold the mountains together.

Conclusion

You will yet live four days. Unpack the gauze from your smiling heart!

THREE POEMS IN THE LANDSCAPE

Mount at the Center of the World

On the hill outside town a dirty white horse, mud up to his knees, grazes on the wild mustard. You stand at the bottom of the hill and look up its length until the rough green of earth gives way to sky, where a buzzard hangs. There is a tangent drawn from the horse's dusty back to the soaring bird, and as the buzzard rocks, the horse steps through the thistle. In front of this mystery, your head becomes a brilliant mote of sun.

The Nostalgia of Loose River

There are many things floating in the Loose River: A dog with the News in his soft mouth, a refrigerator trailing a mustache of chocolate ice cream, the reference librarians of your childhood. The water here is sometimes gray and sometimes a bottle blue so old it hurts your heart. Time sinks to the bottom of the river, and the catfish keep it dusted with tails and fins. They look up through the eddy, whiskers smiling, and ask you to sing to them and make them forget.

Mojave

At 3 am, the moon over the desert burns so brightly it is impossible to sleep. The wind lifts the loose scales of snakes and the dead brown wasps into the air and over the side of the chalk cliff. Alone among this enormity of quiet, this dry erasure of man, you are a fragile bulb of water, a delicate tank of weed. Though it is 200 miles to the nearest hand or voice or light, it is only a matter of inches up to those empty blue suns. A scorpion scuttles across the sand, the electrical crackle of stars and rain.

I, MARIO

Waiting for a table was once a real pleasure. I loved to wait; wait in line; wait for the bus; in slug trails of traffic; for coffee to cool. Waiting gave me so much time to watch; as the saying goes, wait and see. I could wait all day for my oil to be changed, watching the mechanics come and go, wipe their pale palms on a red rag. How I loved to wait for the first whisks of steam when setting water to boil on a slow summer night.

Now, though, older, waiting is a bore. I haven't the time to wait, though it seems I do all day. I wait for red lights to turn green, for the cab in front of me to turn left, for the parking lot man to take my ticket so I can go in to work. I wait for the weekend, and then for the inspiration to do something. I wait out the winter sleet and the spring damp, the mosquito bumps and the piling leaves, every multitudinous haiku of each waning season.

Something is always coming, it seems, but never here. What are you waiting for? I ask, and wait for an answer. I don't know, I say, something better. But better than what? Better than waiting.

Perhaps it's a problem of attention span. When I was very young, I wrote novellas. Then a little older, short stories. Later, short-short stories, and now, of course, prose poems. Perhaps my end lies in video games. Like a teenage boy, I'll compose one-line dramas ending in piquant little deaths: "I Mario, maker of casks, for desiring to climb meet my match in Kong." I'll sell them in the mall for 50 cents a play.

When I'm in my white sheets and preparing to die, then I suppose I won't mind waiting. Each minute will seem like a small, square package wrapped in forest green. It will sit in my palm for a moment, and then I'll open it. What's inside will be a single breath or a throb of blood at my temple. My two sons and three daughters will take the torn paper and the unraveled ribbon and put it in the hospital trash. They will stand around the tiny beige room, clearing their throats, checking their watches. They'll all be wondering in a small blue way how many hours it is till morning.

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