Russell Edson Poems

There was a road that leads him to go to find
a certain time where he sits.

Smokes quietly in the evening by the four legged
...

Out of nothing there comes a time called childhood, which
is simply a path leading through an archway called
adolescence. A small town there, past the arch called youth.
Soon, down the road, where one almost misses the life
...

A man is bringing a cup of coffee to his face,
tilting it to his mouth. It's historical, he thinks.
He scratches his head: another historical event.
He really ought to rest, he's making an awful lot of
...

In sleep when an old man's body is no longer
aware of his boundaries, and lies flattened by
gravity like a mere of wax in its bed . . . It drips
down to the floor and moves there like a tear down a
...

Some coffee had gotten on a man's ape. The man said,
animal did you get on my coffee?

No no, whistled the ape, the coffee got on me.
...

The floor is something we must fight against.
Whilst seemingly mere platform for the human
stance, it is that place that men fall to.
I am not dizzy. I stand as a tower, a lighthouse;
...

There was a man who found two leaves and came
indoors holding them out saying to his parents
that he was a tree.
...

They have little use. They are best as objects of torment.
No government cares what you do with them.

Like birds, and yet so human . . .
...

Mr Brain was a hermit dwarf who liked to eat shellfish off
the moon. He liked to go into a tree then because there is a
little height to see a little further, which may reveal now the
stone, a pebble--it is a twig, it is nothing under the moon that
...

A man is bending his wife. He is bending her
around something that she has bent herself
around. She is around it, bent as he has bent
her.
...