John Ashbery: “The Skaters”

V-IV

	The passions that inhabit a man!
	And the belief that, with them, everything will somehow turn out all right!

	"R was a formean on the Q XX P-Q ranch
	After a brilliant caree XXXXXX beginning as a poet
	He feel love with a ewe from a neighboring farm. hacienda.
	His name is unknown in the university
	And in the wooden pavillion of the Lotus Court.
	He spends all his time reciting poetry to an empty corral."

	Tomorrow our way lies beneath strange cliffs,
	Across murky currents and impossible champaigns.
	I suggest that we both get a little shut-eye.
#
I guess I	All night long I shall be muttering apologies.
shall
	There is nothing worse than being drunk on apricot brandy
	Unless it is waking up the next morning, your
	Head encircled by midges gnats.
	A servant girl in a triped dress brings you a pot of cold water to wash in.
	But the logey feeling persists until well into the afternoon.
How	I long for future periods of temperance and relaxation!

	There is less drunknness in China than elsewhere.
	True, they sing the delights of wood-alcohol
	With all the passion of which the Yellow Race is capable.
	Yet tea, the fermented and dried leaves of the tea-shrub steeped in boiling water, is the national beverage.

	The British, though not averse to hard liquor, are a nation of tea drinkers
	Their liners have a habit of scouting the seven seas in search of the ephemeral brew
	Alas, the capricious bush is partial only to certain shades and climates.
	Often the tea-captain must push on to the furthest shores of sullen Cathay
	To satisfy the whims of his regent. There, a slit-eyed potentate
	Regales him in the Tea Palace over a steaming pot of an unnamed brew.

	The British tea industry has had a phenomenal rise in the last hundred years.
	Britons are the biggest tea-consumers, followed by the United States and Norway.
	In Bolivia last year some 7 millions ofXX gallons of scalding tea was served
	In little bowls, while the Peruvians like to sip it through a porcelain tube.

	But all this is nothing in comparison
	To the interest in fortune-telling via tea-leaves.
	A creful fortune-teller can discern
	Signs peculiar--wreathed woodsmoke, a mounted cowboy
	With spurs and holster, or a cat arching its back on some roof.
	Sometimes a necklace of diamonds, or a snake, or a speeding express train
	Or barred windows, are among the shapes assumed by the capricious herb.

	We are still sitting in the courtyard of the little inn
	Near an open drainage ditch. The wind has dropped again
	And the sun, on the backs of our necks, feels quite warm.