—John Ashbery
Etymology becomes rotund,
experimental, exhausting,
existential; curiosity kills
more than cats. Take
the weather, for ex-
ample. When all
of the chill fog
became an I
Remember
poem. How
much longer
until it’s I Don’t
. . . . Then there was
the what, the Upper Mid-
Western Pandemic? Names
of wildfires. Name that cat-
astrophe. Were it not for the
sequoia smoke, but there would
have been our very own naked lady:
Lady Ghirardelli, despite the misbegotten
namesake, still half god, half diva. But for
the choke of the smoke and the death of the
breath. This world belongs only to itself. In the
beginning was the world? How was I to know? #cawx
