Free Chinese Whispers: Poems by John Ashbery

croon.
    Each to the other thinks: It’s gone. But rotten. Days will
    go on turning themselves inside out for us, and trees warble for us,
    but not often and not very well.

SIR GAMMER VANS
    Last Sunday morning at six o’clock in the evening as I was sailing
    over the tops of the mountains in my little boat a crew-cut stranger
    saluted me, so I asked him, could he tell me whether the little old
    woman was dead yet who
    was hanged last Saturday week for drowning herself in a shower of feathers?
    “Ask Monk Lewis what he thinks ‘been there done that’ means in the so-called
    evening of life. Chances are he’ll regale you with chess moves. All I
    want is my damn prescription.” “And you shall have it, sir ,” he answered
    in a level voice. So he gave me a slice of beer and a cup of cold veal
    and there was this little dog.
    I see no reason to be more polite when the sun has passed its zenith,
    yet ham radio operators infest every cove, defacing walls with their palaver.
    And when two swans come to that, one swoons and is soothed.
    The other lost inside a wall.
    He seemed to think I knew some secret or other pertaining to the botched
    logs in the fireplace. This caused him to avoid me I think
    for a twelvemonth.
    After which we got down to business and actually signed the contract.
    He was inconsolable. The brat had cost him. With two wives and another
    on the way wouldn’t commit himself to a used Chevy. Which is
    understandable I think I said it’s understandable. The man
    was in no mood to entertain these distinctions. At least I thought he said
    bring on the heavy artillery the dream is now or
    it won’t happen, not in my diary. Well why that’s just what
    I think too, I blessed him. Cells in the wind. The sucker’ll be all
    over our new templates, smearing them with grape honey, I’ll
    challenge you for the right to beleaguer. To which he assented
    abstractedly and it was over in a thrush. Not to ... well excuse me
    too. Curses I’d already signed on,
    there was no need to jump for it, put a good face on it. Mild eyes
    expressing a child’s dignity. OK for it to rot, it
    was pompous to begin with.
    “No, don’t hang him,” says he, for he killed a hare yesterday. And if you
    don’t believe me I’ll show you the hare alive in a basket.
    So they built a pontoon bridge, and when they had crossed over the fish applauded.
    I was aghast, lost forty pounds at the gaming tables of the
    Channel Islands, ’sblood I said. So I set fire to my bow, poised my arrow,
    and shot amongst them. I broke seventeen ribs on one side,
    and twenty-one and a half on the other; but my arrow passed clean through
    without ever touching it, and the worst was I lost my arrow;
    however I found it again in the hollow of a tree. I felt it; it felt
    clammy. I smelt it; it smelt honey.

About the Author
    John Ashbery was born in 1927 in Rochester, New York, and grew up on a farm near Lake Ontario. He studied English at Harvard and at Columbia, and along with his friends Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch, he became a leading voice in what came to be called the New York School of poets. Ashbery’s poetry collection Some Trees was selected by W. H. Auden as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize in 1955—the first of over twenty-five critically admired works Ashbery has published in a career spanning more than six decades. His book Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award, and since then Ashbery has been the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a National Humanities Medal, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and a Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other honors.
    For years, Ashbery taught creative writing at Brooklyn College and Bard College in New York, working with students and codirecting MFA programs while continuing to write and publish award-winning collections of poetry—all marked