Contributor’s Marginalia: Randall Mann on “Prayer in the Hope That Nothing Goes Wrong” by John Gallaher

I loved coming across “Prayer in the Hope That Nothing Goes Wrong” by John Gallaher: his poems are always jolts of despair and associative possibility, full of everyday unease and withheld meaning—“chronically hungry,” as he says in the poem. Like John Ashbery, he moves from high to low concerns (Eliot to Boss Hogg), and in that movement, undercuts my thin notions of dichotomy. And there is an all-important menace—“How dark / can it get?”—in the poem, which is visible, but just so, among the merrymaking and leaps of logic; I would argue that, also like Ashbery, the linguistic dance (smiling through gritted teeth) is a form of anxiety, and all the more unsettling as such.

As the poem, which is a puzzle, demanded my attention, I had the urge to look at it backwards, forwards, and sideways—the lines are that good—and see what shaking it up might add up to. So I wrote this poem in response to, and out of my admiration for, John Gallaher’s poem—its syntactical, fantastical example; its fundamental sense of play.


Prayer in the Hope That Nothing Goes Wrong in Reverse

after John Gallaher

Every anticipation is equal, everything you come across:
He says, about the bag I’m holding—for a moment,
on a hotel elevator in New York, holding his shoes—“Nice bag.”
And Tom Wopat twenty years later stands next to me
as they are held at gunpoint by a gang of robbers at the Boar’s Nest.
To bond with their sworn enemies—Boss Hogg and Rosco—
that I can draw my face on! Episode 130, where the Dukes are forced
to be good and smart. Watching TV, the lives that will never be mine,
searching for something about the world in their lives. I also want:
pile-up and pass-by with the well-fed, between-meal crowds,
for the chronically hungry, the truly hungry. The degradations
of ourselves. And dance, but only for those a little hungry,
the hungry ghosts of this world. And imbue them with projections
of them as hungry and blind and confused. We pick up
a forever hungry head, which is how we talk of ghosts. How we think.
It makes the ping pong ball look hungry, the disembodied, hungry head.
“People are smarter when they’re a little hungry,” I’ve read:
that’s Eliot, brought home with a face drawn on it,
human. As I’m looking at another thing, this time a ping pong ball
around the house, a kind of hunger that reminds us of being.
Fill with sticks as the drawers and shelves fill with sticks. Stockpiles.
Can it get, A: Darker? That sort of thing, as the attic and garage—
it’s just business. You’re a stick. Questions arise, like Q: How dark?
Face sticks its little face, staring up at me. Look, it’s nothing personal,
sneaking it out of his room later. Or, let it sit with the rest of his
getting him to part with that stick now. How we’ll have to end up.
He picks up while we’re out walking, and we know it’s going to be difficult,
Pareidolia, thank you. How a face is the first thing Eliot puts on sticks!
How can you spot faces anywhere? For instance, in clouds, tortillas.
It’s another altogether to know what to do with what’s left of Friday,
or that each thing is all things. It’s one thing to understand yourself
in the kitchen trash. Like we’re saying—it’s the child in the trash
looking down at the school art creations of their children—
“I feel like I should be obsessing about things more.” No one says.