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And?

   




That is, is it like what you thought it would be,
when with an assumed calmness you said
to yourself I will become a wonderful old man
basically the same as I am now except,
well, a little different. Now I’m a little different
and beyond that a little more different
and so on. Yes, and so, on
toward the person you thought you wanted to be
but who has turned out to be the one next to him.
And what about that other one, off to the side?




 

“And?” is used by permission from Very Collected Poems (Coffee House Press, 2025). Copyright © 2025 by Ron Padgett.



Ron Padgett’s How Long was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry, and his Collected Poems won the LA Times Prize for the best poetry book of 2014 and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. He has also received the Shelley Memorial Award and the Frost Medal from the PSA. His translations include Zone: Selected Poems of Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars’s Complete Poems. Seven of his poems were used in Jim Jarmusch’s film Paterson. New York City has been his home base since 1960.