Free Flow Chart: A Poem by John Ashbery Page B

window
    but this time doesn’t seem such a long one, mightn’t we return
    to the old cabin, just for a glimpse of the driveway? But that,
    as the parrot said, is another story. Sooner or later you go blind staring at platinum
    and the reverberations that warned against it can themselves no longer be distinguished
    in the thudding and fog, and if all comes to be eclipsed at some
    date in the not-too-near future, then why does it say I’m a salesman with a tie trying to
    interest you in this new product, that can go out of control? It’s the Cotswolds
    for me, but no, he has the name tag in his pants and this string flying behind him
    into what you were told would be a void, which is his study. Heaven help jerks, they need
    it worse than we, yet always something funny acts as a short prelude to disaster, and then afterwards
    everybody is relieved; it’s still a high school; there’s nothing no longer wrong with it
    and the shade acts as a puddle
    from which froglike eyes protrude, if it is indeed this occasion, and this is 901½ McKinstry
    Place, and you are Judson L. Whittaker, oh take this wheelbarrow far from my sight and bury it
    on yonder height, so impatient have my clones become, and I, in the light,
    of this new development am all but induced to come along with you. The stones
    forbid it though. Fire that does not burn? Tell it to the no longer prematurely
    gray slab of expanse, file it in “explanations which leave much unexplained,” but leave me my
    dance, the one underpraised porcelain object on the stand.
    In the western districts greetings proliferate
    and I’m already starting to look better. When was I not
    a paramilitary brother in some sense? Who coined this nickname? For I see
    far, in looking, out over a life, the strange, wrenching mess of it, yet which has
    some undistressed surfaces and unsealed peaks, or bumps, along with much that was fey and
    witless as it went by. Where are those files now? Is it possible they can have been deleted
    in the very mouth of time? Grenades pop, rockets vomit their lucklessness into the sky,
    and which of us wants to bear the responsibility of having looked
    something up? which is why
    the unplanted cabbages stand tearful out of the mist, there is no
    reason to go on ploughing the garden once winter has begun, yet
    what else is there to do, except sweep the floor
    with automatic hand, pondering certain dun sins of omission, if twilight really is a jewel
    as you turned out to be (never fear, the rain
    won’t rob you of your distinctive personality though I saw it streaming
    the other day, down your clothes, you paused and seemed not to know what to think, but I,
    I in my compartment knew: damaged hair, tattered kneecaps, a pimple
    or two, and as automatically as one uncloses a window
    you filed your report, and the court was amazed, emptied in a moment before
    the order of dismissal came. Out of respect I should say I didn’t see you very closely;
    you were too far down for that, not coinciding with anyone’s notion of a “person” yet livelier
    still for it; oh you showed ’em how to fit into the barrel of an ignored idiosyncrasy and
    still have room left over for passages of devastating wit that nightly
    bring the house down. And if sleep is narrower after that, it’s also more pointed,
    slanted like the harrow’s tooth, to bring up what may be coming along
    any second now) and it is, in feathers all over the floor, only now it’s the maid’s turn
    and we may never see what stays groping in her eyes. The floor is lovely, though, passionate
    and filled with bright ideas like a bride only what it says about us isn’t forthcoming.
    Outside the river is magenta and some sunbeams got caught upside down in it, just their
    (our) luck I guess. Meanwhile I have received your postcard. I wanted to tell you
    how much I thought it shouldn’t change, but dairies (diaries?) got in the way and exchanged notes
    at which time the judgment was all but unreadable,