John Ashbery: “The Skaters”

	Today
	A few snowflakes are falling in the airshaft
	And my exile is full of meaning to me in this way.
	The minute the door shut behind me I laughed
	And gripping the jamb of the door, began to sway
	Backward and forward, daft
	With the sensation of loneliness, a fray
	Of colored sensations that waft
	Peacefully across the gray
	Of ordinary feelings, like stXX small craft
	When they put up storm signals late in May
	Henceforth, a prisoner on a bobbing raft

	a
	Of differencXXXXXXXXX indifference, I'd ofXX raft
	Of feelings to sort out. {That one day
	It was a question of me, or that people may
	Have spoken of me,} was one and the same: no shaft
	Could now wound me, no craft
	Perplex. Across the way
	The sun was sinking, casting gray
	Shadows on the front of the buildings. I laughed
	Again, feeling sadness waft
	Like a soothing current. The sway
	Of melancholy had officially begun, could fray
	A curtain. Daft

	half
	Little birds harped on it; daft
	I remembered a peach orchard, like a raft
	Of fragrant blossoms, another dayXXXXXXXXXXX to fray
	It was a prairieXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX a path through hushed seas. Another day
	It was the same, orXX as tall graXXX reeds sway
	And yet things remain the same. Thus one may
	Live on and on, mindless of peanuts that waft
	Their smell your way, like a shaft.
	The old janitress laughed
	To hear us there

He will have managed to find out all about it, the way that people do.