John Ashbery: “The Skaters”

2

	And all who come may understand, and go away
	Before night reaches the this shore.

	"The person," Abe, is lonely
	As that Weenix "Head of a Man," or an old and discolored umbrella.
	Near the postoffice calender with its amazing digits cool company
	The colored perfume of "sense" appropriations makes a kind of shroud
	Of mere slips and postscripts of meaning--here is the central orifice
	Of all the gigantic vocabulary of meaning, like a garden with a central spot or flower.
	A granite terrace extends out into so much that is fresh and green
	As though buoyed up by the negation of its own dishonoring weight.
	Here skulks and ethereal man. The children used to crowd around with toys and goodies,
	He... always had a kind word or some little thing for them.
	He used to offer them presents of candy or lollipops...

	In suppressing the iron links that chain you to the grim desire of reality
	Be careful not to substitute gold ones,
	The execrable charity of platinum cufflinks that views
	Darkness and disaster surrounding us,
	Mass piZZZZZZZ Masts pitched on the slow and denominating tide of ice,
	The perpetual calendar of rubies, emeralds and sapphires
	And other precious stones, gleaning the heart of runnels of
	The milk of human kindness, down to my last unspent dollar,
	Gladness of waking, sportive humor after the that terrible strangeness
	Of being asleep, yet the leather film that still confidesXXXXXXXX confines us
	Asks in vain theXXX of the pear-shaped head of the a governor striding into the room
	Black as pitch after an uneasy night applying seals to the brown scroll
	Of debtor's prison, jail and panic
	Under the uneasy awnings of a careless life.         heliocopter
	Not everything is picknicking on the campus,
	Harlotry and perfections, toddling over green fields         flakes
	Breathless with ectoplasm, from the long run, by heliocopter
	Shirttails hanging out nurtured by coalfields
	Who have taught you to exist in the Pyreness of confusion           pyres
	That is your youth's living image and damnation.

	Abe lifted the bottle slightly closer to his knee.
	The barman (disquieting personage) raised the bottom of a tumbler
	(Snow, flirt and piano) to the level of someone
	Imbibing various personal flares. A jackdaw of           Absorbing
	Undrifting dark, dust rose of the center of gray
	Bottles: wheedled cabs broached the theater's
	Indigo and marble resonances. A guy got out.
	"Where we are that factor encrusts dental snow XXXXX work
	On the umbilical low summits of average pleasure.
	A guy's mother is XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX lug's mother is his true measure, and
	No mother could love an ugly boob like that," and, like a tailor
	Removing the tape measure, "Bats flot around town; sSome,
	Not all, will roost; the others fry stupefaction
	For wise guys' wry brains. {The commuter trains
	Pull slowly away from the planet. Time is a smudge,
	Reckoned by district attorney's impute.
	Square box of decay mixing grain and grape
	To fraulein's necklace, short-circuited systems of abuse."