John Ashbery: “The Skaters”

II-B

(no space here)

[	All this must go into a letter.]
	Also the feeling of being lived, looking for people,
	And the gradual peace and relaxation
	That boil down, through rings of cold and fatigue
	Smearing much of the day into fear
	At find you not in, bloody from beating down doors, and incomprehensible

	But an architecure
	Made of us like rain commands a view
	Of its plain. There's nothing leading to its footman's empathy. It is the attraction of this mucus
	But there's no personal involvement
	These sudden bursts of hot and cold
	Are wreathed in shadowless intensity
	Whose moment saps them of all characteristics
	Thus beginning to rest you at once know.

	Once there was a point in these islands,
	Coming to see where the rock has rotted away,
	Buying milk, and becoming a poiXXX tiny point in the distance.

	But war's savagery... Even the most patient scholar, now
	Could hardly reconstruct the old fort exactly as it was
	That trees continue to wave over it. That there is also a small museum somewhere inside
	That the history of costume is a no less fascinating study than the history of great migrations.
	I'd like to bugger you all up
	Deliberately falsify all your old suck-ass notions
	Of how chivalry is being lived. What goes on in beehives.
	But the whole nasty rotten mess, deliberate XXXXXXXXXXX misunderstandings included
	Problems about the tunic button etc. How much of any one person is there.

	Still, after bananas and spoonbread in the shadow of the old walls
	It is cooling to return to the shadow of eaves in the shower
	That probably fell while we were inside, examining bowknots
	Old light-bulb sockets, places where the whitewash had begun to flake
	With here and there an old map or illustration. Here's one for instance--
	Looks like a weather map... or a coiled bit of wallpaper with a design
	Of faded hollyhocks, or abstract fruit and gumdrops in chains

	The wind soughs carefully in the umbrella pines.
	How nice to lie on one's back, looking up
	Into that worlXXXX bird-hopping world of flecked sunlight and shadow.
	But how is it you are always indoors, looking through at too-heavilyXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX peering at too-heavily cancelled stamps through a greasy fingerprinted magnifying glass?
	And slowly the incoherencies of day melt in
	A general wishful thinking of night
	To peruse certain stars over the bay.
	Cataracts of peace pour from the poised heavens
	And only fear of snakes prevents us from passing the night in the open air.
	The day is definitely at an end.