Friday 14 November 2014

Far Harbor

—after John Ashbery

On the out the dickens we didn’t try your recipe
to hold up the touted soufflé and make amends,

all but the gas oven standing its ground.

The ball park closes its eye to the sky and players
pray and swing their ballasts to packed applause.

A happy couple drifts closer, all the borrowed notes

and time being with you and that is enough.
The body shifts in all this, gradually the world turns

around on it, so we are bystanders standing up

to towering spiders and bury our things with us
in the crawl space where the narrative give way

to panic, the calm voice of reason then reassuring

despite the atonal motifs and turn of slashed signatures
the fingering on scales confines us to our favorite keys.

(Nov. 14, 2014)




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