jane dark's sugarhigh!

partial review: john ashbery's a worldly country

And just as waves are anchored to the bottom of the sea
we must reach the shallows before God cuts us free.

For a while we caught the spirit of things
as they had drifted in the past. And we got
to know them really well.

all was certain on the Via Negativa
except the certainty of return, return
to the approximate.

It will be over in a minute, you said. We both
believed that, and the clock's ticking. Flame on, flame on.

one or two distinct crises remain to be finessed.

We're leaving again of our own volition
for bogus patterned plains streaked by canals,
maybe. Amorous ghosts will pursue us
for a time, but sometimes they get, you know, confused and
forget to stop when we do, as they continue to populate this
fertile land with their own bizarre self-imaginings.

I guess what I'm saying is
don't be more passive-aggressive
or purposely vague than you have to
to clinch the argument.

In all plays, even Hamlet, the scenery
is the best part.

It's been real. I mean really real,
like you can't imagine it. The city was leaving anyway,
closing its ranks behind him. Soon no one
would remember the boy in dross who used to come
and stare through the skateboards at the abandoned furniture warehouses.

I said, in times of war
we make good warriors.
In peace we are as nothing:
good dads or bankers.

Why not give real life a chance? I was here
and did nothing about it. Therefore I am condemned
to the punishment of the just: long, loose-skeined parades
along service routs. Is there a perfect tense for that?

We're leaving again of our own volition
for bogus patterned plains, shreds of maps recurring
like waves on a beach, each unimaginable
and likely to go on being so.

The wraparound flux we intuit

as time has other claims on our inventiveness.
A lot of retail figures in it.

Posted by jane at May 26, 2008 04:37 PM | TrackBack