“The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poems” spend its whole self trying to define the absolutely undefinable prose poem.

Gary Young defines is as “a single line of prose that [can run] for nearly 100 pages…lyrical narratives that hold within their knot of language a world, a whole story.  Nancy Elmers says the first prose poems she read were “ofen surrealist fables, surrealist odes;”and goes on to list some definitions (note the plural) of a prose poem, some of which you find quoted below in Poem 83. Jo Bonomo says that the prose poem is the antidote to poems that “seemed to rise heroically from my page and then quickly sit down again, winded, their skinny limbs barely up to the task of supporting their bodies.”

My definition would read:  just about anything that is self-contained, has poetic metaphors, alliteration, assonance, consonance, etc, and is a bit off kilter.  I especially like the “off kilter” part.  It allows me to follow my imaginative energy anywhere it wants to wander.  And that works for me.

Poem 81

What do you do with yourself when you wake up and discover you have been sleeping – waking to a dream within a dream over and over again until this moment of waking – wonder if you *are* awake this time?  Sniff the air for clove and lavender because you always wake to vanilla and cinnamon? Listen for the splash and gurgle of  falling water on the run over uneven rocks because you have always loved the sea and surely you must belong on it, near it?  Drop to your knees in fear and gratitude?  Look for a sign, pinch your arm, touch the green grass, kiss the ground?

We are like fish swimming in water unaware there is any other element until we are hooked, dragged into a foreign atmosphere, find ourselves gasping for any small breath we might thankfully take, the old life slipping away little by little until that which we were is dead.  This is not about reincarnation, it is about being incarnate in this world where we find our pond dried and gone, all of us finned folks needing to walk on land, grow lungs (grow wings).  We did not come as frogs to transform under the auspices of lips touching lips.  No.  We come to be aware, thought we were, are confounded that we haven’t been, are not.  Maybe the breakthrough is one of seeing without blinders, taking off the glasses tinted with sunset hues, putting on clean lens, finding the light so dazzling as to blind us – awake but still not seeing.

Ring the tiny bell you find in your hand, call what goddess names you find on your lips moving in prayer – to whom you do not know.  Find you can breathe.  Take a step.  Any path will now lead home because you carry home within your heart.

Poem 82

I think of how easily we get used to things, how they become seasonal cycles in our lives: the surprise accident integrated, the anger and fear smoothed like a knife over rough icing, covering over the sweetness below, the burst of flavor a fierce memory, the yearning toward it calling

like the morning bells call us to church.  When did we release the taste for sugar, acquiesce only to the covering over, out-of-sight-remembrance being enough –

not satisfying, not filling – but enough to keep the vivid hunger at bay, as if hunger is merely a thought as well, something that can be settled by denial, disengaged from death.

Poem 83

“I approach the page with the same impulse I did when writing poetry:  less with a subject than with a note struck inside of myself.”  Joe Bonomo

It will never be middle C with me.  More often those on the lower registry all boom and bass, only every now and then a screech from high C way up the piano keyboard signifying a moment of existential terror of some sort. If you move away from the keyboard and out into the world, there I am in the dark, at the fringes, too far for the campfire to even send a play of shadows over my face.  I am not afraid of darkness and have always named It friend as I have the beings that shuffle there with me, our arms linked, our feet more in unison than not, humming in a minor key something you would recognize if you heard it – sort of like the whales’ long songs, the ones they learn as if by some magic, the ones they all sing, the ones that change and like quarks each whale knows when and changes her own song to match.  It is not lonely here.  We learn much from watching the light – bright to soft shadow – secrets can’t hide here, they sparkle like fireworks, something about their DNA and how it reacts with the environment.  Let’s face it:  too much light blinds, you can’t trust what you think you see.

Vision, foggy around the edges, as if crisp and clear is more a result of innocence than good sight, age blurring what is seen knowing half of it is only what is expected from what has been seen before.  When I say chair, what do you see? Does it have 3 legs or 4, or maybe one?  How about table?  Then there are the abstract words:  love, hate, soul, karma, hell, angel.  Tell me what you see – is it blurred or bright?

Around the corner from yesterday, Momma plays me to sleep sitting at the Baby Grand, never needing music, her hands traveling the ivories duplicating what’s she’s heard somewhere: Rachmaninoff to Boogie Woogie and Delta blues with a little Rock and Roll in between – she was raised in Rosedale, that’s in Mississippi, close by to the River’s untamed wildness, before the Corps came, back when the water rose and you ran for higher ground.  Once the railroad ran through there, and my Grandmother, who died long before I was brought into the family, ran a boarding house on the other side of the tracks for people who debarked and needed a place to stay.  The biggest thing that’s happened there is the arrival of the Piggly Wiggly and its hot black asphalt parking lot.  They even tore down the old town market where once I wandered in, in my 40s, and was taken to my Aunt’s house just because I knew her name.  She never left, my Aunt – died there in the house she built with her husband (dead 40 years before her).  Think: Shirley Maclaine in  Steel Magnolias.

A prose poem is a hushed, bare description of a dangerous moment… A prose poem speculates on what is just outside the frame. A prose poem insists on the reality of a dreamscape…Sometimes it’s just good to have the illusion of being in a place without fences.  Nancy Elmers

If I tell you what I see here at the edges, you will tell me I am dreaming, but then you would be inside my dream, wouldn’t you?  Are you dreaming?  Because I am not and rising up my back, vertebra by vertebra is an intuitive gasp that makes the hair on my arms stand at attention, brings the taste of bile to the back of my throat.  If I could see more clearly I would be able to describe it but it is more shhhh than scream and so I am quiet.  We are always wrong when we don’t listen to our gut and mine is more urgently by the moment, with a rising intonation, telling me to run.  But which way I whisper?  It is as if I am encircled and the circle is getting smaller.  I would like a fire, a candle, a match if I could but if this is a dream, then it is like the phone you can’t dial, or, these days even dreams having updated, the phone whose keys won’t punch through.  It is never good to eat pizza and pickles together.  Meanwhile, I think I see white teeth or maybe a gleaming serrated saw…something glinting, something shuffling through dry leaves, something just under hearing that is moaning.  Clouds hiding stars.  Dark of the moon.  Winter solstice. Only it’s June and bright light outside.  I try hard to fly but am anchored to the ground, maybe I never could.  More’s the pity.  Practice could have made perfect.  Don’t bury your talents – it never turns out well.  Just ask Matthew.

I take a breath.  It shudders through me, like window blinds buzzing from wind, like a strained voice unable to hold that high C.  There is no sheet music to read and my memory fails.  In the distance I think I hear my Momma singing.