John Ashbery: “The Skaters”

The Vacationers

	Perhaps she, in her way
	By the day's last rays, reads my letter.
	And I am promised and never sent.
	On flat landscapes the projections occur.
	And one wishes to escape civilization.
	A world of alien diseases is best,
	Tyrant fruits, and big-voiced birds
	Bespeaking the awe of peace in orange groves
	By seaweed fires. But aAt home the bespectacled
	Reader of newsprint shuns the baroque kiosk.
	To send a sheet of paper through the mails
	Is hugely difficult. Dirt, darkness and destruction abound
	In the so-called modern "paradise"--he thinks
	As the trolley draws away from the tracks.
	There, leafy near swers in theXXXXXXXXXXXX sewers in the enchanted dusk
Is	Tthe one you say goodbye to, and wait for and return to
	In a straw hat, next to the automatic dispenser's tired
	Aluminum mirror, [??]XX beside the open door in front of a mop.

	Food is the only problem here. What foods
	To cram down our throats?

	But somehow the mirth of everything rolls us along
blind?	Laughing and tired, and commenting on our journey
	Before it happens, and leaves us at the end.

	But the boys always return
	Mechanically to he docks, in the squinting sunset, and in the end the feeling of peace
	Is traded for light hands winding something
	You cannot see, around your head,
	Perhaps a band with numbers and the colors
	Of a flag, or a message of typewritten
	Punctuation marks, or a sentence: "Incandescent death
	Sprays me, moos drawls. There is perfection in feeling
	That I might have died." But this cannot be put into words.

withdraws