John Ashbery

To all events I squirted you knowing this not to be this came to pass when we were out and it looked good. Why wouldn’t you want a fresh piece of outlook to stand in down the years? See, your house, a former human energy construction, crashed with us for a few days in May and sure enough, the polar inscape brought about some easier poems, which I guessed was a good thing. At least some of us were relaxed, Steamboat Bill included. He didn’t drink nothing. It was one thing to be ready for their challenge, quite another to accept it. And if I had a piece of advice for you, this is it: Poke fun at balm, then suffer lethargy to irradiate its shallow flood in the new packaging our enemies processed. They should know. The Gold Dust Twins never stopped supplicating Hoosiers to limn the trail. There’s no Shakespeare. Through the window, Casanova. Couldn’t get to sleep in the dumb incident of those days, crimping the frozen feet of Lincoln.

Here in life, they would understand. How could it be otherwise? We had groped too, unwise, till the margin began to give way, at which point all was sullen, or lost, or both. Now it was time, and there was nothing for it. We had a good meal, I and my friend, slurping from the milk pail, grabbing at newer vegetables. Yet life was a desert. Come home, in good faith. You can still decide to. But it wanted warmth. Otherwise ruse and subtlety would become impossible in the few years or hours left to us. “Yes, but . . .” The iconic beggars shuffled off   too. I told you, once a breach emerges it will become a chasm before anyone’s had a chance to waver. A dispute on the far side of town erupts into a war in no time at all, and ends as abruptly. The tendency to heal sweeps all before it, into the arroyo, the mine shaft, into whatever pocket you were contemplating. And the truly lost make up for it. It’s always us that has to pay. I have a suggestion to make: draw the sting out as probingly as you please. Plaster the windows over with wood pulp against the noon gloom proposing its enigmas, its elixirs. Banish truth-telling. That’s the whole point, as I understand it. Each new investigation rebuilds the urgency, like a sand rampart. And further reflection undermines it, causing its eventual collapse. We could see all that from a distance, as on a curving abacus, in urgency mode from day one, but by then dispatches hardly mattered. It was camaraderie, or something like it, that did, poring over us like we were papyri, hoping to find one correct attitude sketched on the gaslit air, night’s friendly takeover.

A blue anchor grains of grit in a tall sky sewing I inch and only sometimes as far as the twisted pole gone in spare colors Too late the last express passes through the dust of gardens

the bruise will stop by later. For now, the pain pauses in its round, notes the time of day, the patient’s temperature, leaves a memo for the surrogate: What the hell

You can’t say it that way any more. Bothered about beauty you have to Come out into the open, into a clearing, And rest. Certainly whatever funny happens to you Is OK. To demand more than this would be strange Of you, you who have so many lovers, People who look up to you and are willing To do things for you, but you think It’s not right, that if they really knew you . . . So much for self-analysis. Now, About what to put in your poem-painting: Flowers are always nice, particularly delphinium. Names of boys you once knew and their sleds, Skyrockets are good—do they still exist? There are a lot of other things of the same quality As those I’ve mentioned. Now one must Find a few important words, and a lot of low-keyed, Dull-sounding ones. She approached me About buying her desk. Suddenly the street was Bananas and the clangor of Japanese instruments. Humdrum testaments were scattered around. His head Locked into mine. We were a seesaw. Something Ought to be written about how this affects You when you write poetry: The extreme austerity of an almost empty mind Colliding with the lush, Rousseau-like foliage of its desire to communicate Something between breaths, if only for the sake Of others and their desire to understand you and desert you For other centers of communication, so that understanding May begin, and in doing so be undone.

He makes better errors that way. Pass it around at breakfast: the family and all, down there with a proximate sense of power, lawyering up. Less log-heavy, your text-strategy beat out other options, is languid. Duets in the dust start up, begin. Again. He entered the firm at night. The 26th is a Monday.