Last time we met we named all our favorite authors
We rattled off their names so fast that in no time at all the only ones left were us
And when it was just you and I we huddled by the heater
A fully furnished flat including sheets and house plants for €700
O, the sheets were spotless
And there was a slanted skylight and snowflakes falling overhead
When I was young I would have spawned in a place like this
21
p.s. I think about those 400 lines Pound cut from Eliot, what would have happened had they fallen into the hands of John Ashbery
Or if Pound had come back and began hacking away at Ashbery’s work
John smiles at seeing Ezra wield his axe
Whole lines fall away like so many woodchips and the air becomes perfumed for it is first-rate wood
John scrambles to recover his lines, which, if you bothered to count them, would no doubt amount to 400
In their brand-new order, they form a right and proper Ashbery poem
Any line of which could well be a new beginning
22
To never meet again is a pretty good idea
A good idea is quite enough, but putting it into practice belongs to a whole other sphere
A beautiful idea like this will give an impetus to poetry, the discovery of situationalism and the invention of distillation
Allows three or four people to share a joint outside a bistro
A bag of smuggled weed finally renders poetry’s materiality a little more concrete
The trouble is this poetry has got to be better than the very best weed
What I mean is it must be awfully good poetry or it’s all a total waste
23
She said, in music class they have a silent keyboard for practicing your fingering
Your hands absorb the notes, store them in the loops and whorls of your fingertips
And the only time you hear them is when you caress
I can hear them very clearly, O, what a beautiful sound system
And that wilderness from which I hear a faraway echo is my body, is it not?
I would like to say it is that thing we call remember
But it’s what we call forget
26
I once heard tell of a postal worker who abandoned a big bag of mail he was carrying
He said that it was filled with nothing but bills and subpoenas, parking tickets, junk mail and the like
The man became manically depressed at the knowledge that no one writes real letters anymore
In short, because we no longer write to each other, he was carted off to prison
In a 24-hour laundromat I switched to reading Dostoevsky
He’d have understood what it means to wash your dirty laundry with strangers
O look, we’ve accumulated more metaphors to use—now, no one will bother you, at least for awhile
27
That so many photos will be so lightly cast aside, I deeply sympathize with the disappointment of viewers
Like a cat in search of a cool and shady place to take a nap who finds a place satisfying to its nap
Such photos don’t pretend to offer viewers the sort of comforting imagery that gratifies their expectations
Might as well imagine a dying elephant that withdraws to somewhere nestled among the hills to await its final moment
The elephant leaves the herd and neither eats nor drinks in anticipation of its impending disintegration in the wild
Death in the form of an elephant hides itself away in order to mature and grow strong like any aloof and indifferent thing
I do not know if the sleeper passed away of a snowy evening because language is no longer inhabitable
28
A cardboard egg carton filled with eggs fills me with sadness
You need a dozen babies one after the other to fill a single carton
O, I’ve come across Mary, come across her here and there, come across her everywhere
Are you aware, I ask, that your baby will walk upon water?
Are you aware, I ask, that your baby will rise from the dead?
Mary, I said, will you look at that carton?
Mary, why is your baby on that cross?
