Here you are.
- Letter
The saint, we, flayed.
I’m a pile of nervous skin.
You an ascending blaze of sanctum.
Thousands flail, in observance of you.The thread, us, frayed.
You are a rainbow/brown braid.
Tied to your finger is a knot that reminds you of yourself.
I’m a brown rain brain.
Families of animals devour themselves behind my eyelids.
Podunk spiderwebs cross my mind, a public derelict.
My brain, an empty scrotum, fathers nothing.
- Lieder ship, leaden ship
I’d pour vast spaces
(E.g. insides of harps, skies)
With heart-colored roseblood. (more…)
- one-off 6
My second walk of the day, or
my sixth way of walking, which is to say
I’m in need of something. I’ve forgotten why I came here;
why in the first place, and why today.
- “I don’t know if the poet has a role, but I have my hopes for the poem…”
Ben Lerner, from “The Lichtenberg Figures”
It is always already winter.
Raccoons open each other for warmth.
The poor live under the bridge outside of time.
If we can speak of the poor. If you can call that a bridge.
At a fashionable retrospective, a woman soils her prewar dress.In order to avoid saying “I,” the author eats incessantly.
The author experiences pleasure from a great distance,
like the bombing of an embassy. In the business district,
fire is exchanged. The media butcher the suspect’s name.Every weekend, the law gets laid,
while these abstractions, hung like horses,
attend their semiformals stag. The last censuscounts several selves inhabiting this gaze,
mostly unemployed.
- “How to Read John Ashbery”
Meghan O’Rourke, in Slate:
John Ashbery wrote his first poem when he was 8. It rhymed and made sense (”The tall haystacks are great sugar mounds/ These are the fairies’ camping grounds”) and the young writer—who had that touch of laziness that sometimes goes along with precocity—came to a realization: “I couldn’t go on from this pinnacle.” He went on, instead, to write poems that mostly didn’t rhyme, and didn’t make sense, either. His aim, as he later put it, was “to produce a poem that the critic cannot even talk about.” It worked. Early on, a frustrated detractor called him “the Doris Day of Modernism.” Even today a critic like Helen Vendler confesses that she’s often “mistaken” about what Ashbery is up to. You can see why: It simply may not be possible to render a sophisticated explication de texte of a poem that concludes “It was domestic thunder,/ The color of spinach. Popeye chuckled and scratched/ His balls: it sure was pleasant to spend a day in the country.”
- One-off 4
There are at least layers to everything I see now,
rarely a naked exception. Notorious for speed,
my humanity has grown dysfunctionally rigid in a papier mache
saq that cusps me from free kiting, or drags me in tow to know air
where no wind is. (more…)
- One-off 3
Like golf-pencils for a compass,
And angles for a protractor,
You gave me the bread and song.
Can we slide-rule (slipstick) my logs and roots, again,
Without an abacus to rattle rhythms with?
- One-off 2
As one of my favorite drawers drew:
There is no time for love on a see-saw.
Like sighs down a pair of rubberneckers
throating by the sea-side of the airplane,
no one can cause what would ail and heal,
in and out, without a heavy dance partner.
Otherwise you’re sitting in their utter
abandonment, let go to the stillness
of the foglight glow.
- One-off 1
I mark memorial day this time with a rotten x;
The lines of which I draw not with inc,
but with a hulk of corn cobs i’ve piled,One kernal for each colonel? No, but rather
A husk for each shucked soldier.
A corn cob pile and a button that ends on the dotted line…With delight of summer fare, war fare;
A grill for each grilled confessor.
Poem for every dollar billed to me.This time, we
count to ten before
breathing again.
