Russell Edson Poems

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.
...

There was once a hog theater where hogs performed
as men, had men been hogs.

One hog said, I will be a hog in a field which has
...

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

An elephant went to bed and pulled a crazy quilt up under
its tusks.

But just as the great gray head began filling with the gray
...

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.
...

I think, therefore I am, said a man whose mother quickly
hit him on the head, saying, I hit my son on the head,
therefore I am.
No no, you've got it all wrong, cried the man.
...