No Matter: Poems - Softcover

Jana Prikryl is the author of No Matter and The After Party, which was one of The New York Times's Best Poetry Books of the Year. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, The Paris Review, and The New York Review of Books, where she is a senior editor and the poetry editor.

Got
off a stop early but no harm.

A pleasant walk. This is a different place.

Lady at the counter doesn’t know it either,

no use asking.

Lucky you turned when you did

and saw the ceiling of the Brooklyn Bridge

not ten feet above. Never noticed

the whole thing’s umber, made of brownstone.

How same this town is, same as itself, unyielding.

It gives you time, almost, to make

observations such as this, it draws them out

like the East River pretending

to be a river when it’s merely an appetite.

I’ll take it from here, you think, I know the way.

Just barely convincing.

Then you saw St. Peter’s down below, confirming

this is Dumbo

and thought yes, finally they’ve made it right

with Malta: set forth on the long downward path

of sandy steps a touch too long and shallow

for human locomotion faster than deep reluctance

southwest, Spanish gravel, attractive, toward the church,

when houses on the way start exploding.
Anonymous
Her hair is parted in the center and this side

wall of the house ends just above her part.

The seam between the house and not-­house

seems to rise out of the part in her hair.

Dandelions on the lawn are playing

sundials, their globes give out the time

of year. She’s not smiling so much

as grimacing against the pull of the brush

and squinting against the sun. Nowhere are

her feet more than tacit. She is the tallest one.
Waves
on the Hudson just a few inches

above the crown of my head, it’s fall but the leaves

as green as the afternoons humid,

they fall from the trees a halfhearted yellow,

unswayed by the unforthcoming change.

How you crossed that island I don’t know,

one of the blasts must have nudged you.

The Hudson is a river though, with genuine water

going one way most of the time, a true expression.

Not much else here, of the city I knew.

The doggerel place, a place you pray

to be delivered from through

not too much exertion of your own.

I designate the gondola

to Hog Island my second home,

may I get carried away in perpetuity.

Deliver me as down along a zip line—­

these piles, these ornate cornices

best seen if not in enlargements of scenes

of Myrna Loy’s xmas eve between

martinis then through the blinds

of function rooms where hopefuls in colorless

uniforms circulate edible miniatures—­

even if the view going down differs

from the view going up.

The city welcomes you.

The cathedral perhaps, its smoking dome

still visible over the charred fastnesses

of Village and East Village,

still visible when I turn.

And here we reach the shores of speculation.