Shearsman 51 Dennis Barone Two Prose Pieces Let Us Suppose A penny is cheaper than a thought, something animal: a body with four legs, perhaps. A scraped knee, cut and bruised by the architecture, swelled even. And fifty yards backwards and under the heel, a cigarette. Its downward spiral and stars so snug in their heavenly design instead. The spit arched over the edge and away. Like that: dwarf zinnias on the other side of the rail and a habitual movement of the foot and under the heel, a cigarette smoldering. So distant from the door, from the animal in its cage, from the outer edge of understanding an image that suggests rather than replicates a car parked surreptitiously in the driveway. Hands in pockets; eyes on the porch and the heel, a cigarette smashed to smithereens, kept at it, gone up in smoke, gone. Twisted and turned, enclosed. Starting out, something less, like the expression: we heard the clock in his voice for the first time today, his hands whistling. Like the expression: line up in front, smoldering – somewhat less than a shock, but more than a surprise. The stairs remain but the guests disappear. Dewy air brightens as a rosy sun rises over stern shoulders and beneath the heel, a cigarette that had glistened. What would soldiers have said if invited to square dance? Too hungry for speaking they stuff their mouths full of macaroni and cheese. Love was like that, too. The manufactories keep producing more hats and more ties and more stickpins and more cigarettes. Professional ones. Ones we’ve romanticized. Blue ones. Plaster of paris ones. They are wet; they are dried in an endless repetition of stone and air. Storm drain and stop sign: more words only repeat a cage of quotation marks: the animal, the night, the burning match, the temple of grammar, and the inability to move or to think or to spend a dime. Whatever is convenient, lit, cheap, or will rhyme with it. The expression of concern so perfect that prayer enters to glance at a watch, to return an allusion without the utterance. The perfect river: its title lit in matchless color.     Denial The play of “art” and “architect” in one line clears the rest of the page for a better disguise. I'd clap but I have to keep my four paws to the ground. I am afraid of tipping, of tripping, of breaking through to the underworld. There are too many toy soldiers here trying to play this game. They heave their duffle bags on to the flatbed of trucks setting out for every distant corner. Very few of them have read Emerson’s Essays. It is not required reading when you’re stuck on the surface of things. If I had enough time to complete my education, then the Australian crawl would become the mode of locomotion to rescue me from the blood on my hands, the blood in my spit; from a shooting star or spinning leaf. There are too many books in your collection and that man outside has a white belt across his shoulder. There is too much contrast. He signals for a car to stop, but it soon becomes a shouting match out there and this too is a distraction. How will I ever learn anything? The surface of things needs a little bit of polish. The surface has become brown and silent. You tell me that it is just a game. Then one of the trucks pulls up here and I’m not sure about how I’ll feel when asked to move. I'm not sure if I can carry all that weight, all those books bound in black vellum that you require for your next settlement somewhere out there beyond the flat topped ridges with their golden trees, somewhere out there in all that wind and heavy breathing. It’s the knowledge that matters, not the ceremony, not the panting or the pawing. A month later, two months later all the places in the line have been taken. The red paint has chipped on their uniforms. There is no space left for any of our regrets. I had thought that I could keep everything on a single line, but their hands are in my pockets. They have turned me inside out, and I no longer have that penny to offer you for your thoughts.   copyright © Dennis Barone, 2002 Dennis Barone is Professor of English at Saint Joseph College in West Hartford, Connecticut. His three collections of short fiction are: Abusing the Telephone (Drogue Press, 1994), The Returns (Sun & Moon, 1996) and Echoes (Potes & Poets, 1997), which won the 1997 America Award for the most outstanding book of fiction by a living American writer. His other publications include a novella, Temple of the Rat (Left Hand Books, 2000), Separate Objects: Selected Poems (Left Hand Books, 1998) and, as editor, Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995).