Ron Padgett by Siobhán Padgett, 2020
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Morning
Who is here with me?
My mother and an Indian man.
(I am writing this in the past.)
The Indian man is not a man,
but a wooden statue just outside
the limits of wood. My mother
is made of mother. She touches
the wood with her eyes and the eyes
of the statue turn to hers, that is,
become hers. (I am not dreaming.
I haven’t even been born yet.)
There is a cloud in the sky.
My father is inside the cloud,
asleep. When he wakes up, he
will want coffee and a smoke.
My mother will set fire
to the Indian and from deep inside
her body I will tell her
to start the coffee, for even now
I hear my father’s breathing change.
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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. His translations include Zone: Selected Poems of Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars’ Complete Poems. Padgett has collaborated with artists Joe Brainard, Jim Dine, Alex Katz, George Schneeman, and Trevor Winkfield. Seven of his poems were used in Jim Jarmusch’s film, Paterson. His most recent collection is Big Cabin (Coffee House Press). ["Morning," from Collected Poems (Coffee House Press, 2013), is used by permission; © 2013 by Ron Padgett.]
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(L-R) Jim Jarmusch, Ron Padgett, and Adam Driver attend the New York Special Screening of Amazon Studios and Bleecker Street's "Paterson" at Landmark Sunshine Theater on December 15, 2016 in New York City. (Photo by Paul Bruinooge/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)