Russell Edson Poems

Since the fern can't go to the sink for a drink of
water, I graciously submit myself to the task, bringing two
glasses from the sink.
And so we sit, the fern and I, sipping water together.
...

You haven't finished your ape, said mother to father,
who had monkey hair and blood on his whiskers.

I've had enough monkey, cried father.
...

A woman prepared a mouse for her husband's dinner,
roasting it with a blueberry in its mouth.

At table he uses a dentist's pick and a surgeon's scalpel,
...

A man ambushed a stone. Caught it. Made it a prisoner.
Put it in a dark room and stood guard over it for the
rest of his life.
...

A scientist has a test tube full of sheep. He
wonders if he should try to shrink a pasture
for them.
They are like grains of rice.
...

There was a man who didn't know how to sleep; nodding
off every night into a drab, unprofessional sleep. Sleep that
he'd grown so tired of sleeping.
He tried reading The Manual of Sleep, but it just put him
...

A man is fighting with a cup of coffee. The rules: he must not
break the cup nor spill its coffee; nor must the cup break the
man's bones or spill his blood.
...

On the other side of a mirror there's an inverse world,
where the insane go sane; where bones climb out of the
earth and recede to the first slime of love.
...

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
...