John Ashbery: “The Skaters”

To a Waterfowl

	Where, like a pillow on a bed
	I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude
	Where through the Golden Coast, and groves of orange and citron
My genial	And one clear call for me—
spirits fail	Then felt I like some watcher of the skies,
	The desire of the moth for the star. And with thee fade away into the forest dim
	When first the College Rolls receive his name.

	If ought of oaten stop, or pastoral song
	Not a flower to be pressed of the foot that falls not...
	I have desired to go
	Too happy, happy tree
	Here, where men sit and hear each other groan.
	Our lingering parents, and to the Eastern Gate
	Forget this rotten world, and unto thee
	Go, for they call you, Shepherd, from the hill
	And the eye travels down to Oxford's towers.

	Calm was the day, and through the trembling air
	Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair
	And she also to use newfangleness...
	Why cannot the Ear be closed to its own destruction?
	Last noon beheld them full of lusty life,
	Unaffected by "the march of events,"
	Never until the mankind making
	From harmony, from heavenly harmony
	O death, O cover you over with roses and early lilies!
	With loaded arms I come, pouring for you
	Sunset and evening star
	Where roses and white lilies grow.

	Go, lovely rose,
	This is no country for old men, The young
	Midwinter spring is its own season
	And a few lilies blow. They that have power to hurt, and will do none.
	Looking as if she were alive, I call.
	The vapours weep their burthen to the ground.
	Even as a child, of sorrow that we give
	Of Walsingham . . .
	Obscurest night involved the sky
	When Loie Fuller with her Chinese veils
	And many a nymph who wreathes her brow with sedge . . .
	We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
	In drear-nighted December
	Ripe apples drop about my head
	Who said: two vast and trunkless legs of stone
	To throw that faint thin line upon the shore!
	O well for the fisherman's boy, he
	Conspiring with him how to load and bless.

	Fra Pandolf's hand
	Steady thy laden head across a brook...
	With charm of earliest birds; pleasant the sun

	Fills the shadows and windy places
	Here in the long unlovely street.
	Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
	The freezing stream below.
	To know the change and feel it...

	Ah, what avails the sceptered race!
	I have desired to go.
	Ah, what the form divine!
	At that far height, the cold thin atmosphere
	Pressed her cold finger closer to her lips
	Where the dead feet walked in.
	She dwells with Beauty--Beauty that must die.
	Or the car rattling o'er the stony street.