Ashbery

Floatingly


Kill the white beaches, the hotel bugs!
The crumbs on a table sang this song to insulate themselves,
but the chickens merely pecked harder.  We do, we don't, we do, we do mean
to vacuum these crumbs, unless someday an idiot boy
pass through the wood on his way to the ballpark,
tossing his cap unassumingly, for what is, in fact, a gesture?
It is only a gesture.  So, sure, morons
can be on your side of the spleen fence: It's only gurus
matter to outsiders, after all, the lame girl said.

She spoke, and I averred:
No one who has known this beach can undo the righteousness that begat it
out of sand, close to a fence.
By the same token, one needs two tin cans.

And let the browsers beware, she famously
ad-libbed, for chickens are like jurists in at least one sense:
Neither is wanted when the old line undulates,
shrieking its core across water.

No saffron impediment to evening's fine-sanded
elliptical body,

for the presence of a mote is always singular.
Towheaded ideas learn from and are transformed by them.
We have only too much lettuce, lettuce to give away.
Our fronds shall not know us
nor apocryphal lectures train us to eye the side aisles.



nytimes