only like living.
—John Ashbery
I’d think he thinks there was a
joke he planted about reading
these lines, his words, after he
was gone. But then, I really do
not know. I’ve grown quite ac
quainted with what I think of
as his humor, which is generally,
or more often than not, pretty
bleak. A funny thing, certainly,
to be able, with some feeling of
authority, to think of him at all
as if I have even a general idea of
what he was doing all along, with
the sidewalks of words he built as
he wrote. Sometimes someone
else might pour a bit of concrete
or lay down a square set of nailed
planks into which to pour this salad.
I project this upon the man who wrote
a grand sum of these sidewalk collages
from which I glean clear stories seen
by endless angles, or become hard-set
on how absolute the narrative of some
of them hold intact, despite the absurdity.
You’d think him my favorite, but he’s not.
Frank’s snacks, Jimmy’s elevated lines of
observation, these are more my cups of
tea. Although I don’t drink tea much, unless
chilled with Splenda. Lately, I’ve wanted
to put in some lemon juice, so I just this
moment took a break to ask Alexa to add
lemon juice to my grocery list. Maybe I
should switch it to fresh lemons, but there’s
no need to involve my new roommate in
that idea. I need to take an inventory of
what books of his I have yet to read. Even
as I poopoo his my-cup-of-tea worthiness,
each next time I read one of his poems or
one of his books, it gets better. And there
are hardly that many memorable poems
(though endless memorable moments).
That’s heresy to no small few of you, or of
those who read him anywhere near as much
as I do. But what I was going to say is that
even if for me his tomes don’t hold what I’d
consider my favorite poems, even of those
of his spare and problematic ‘school’ – which
of course I’ll admit has had a most profound
and expansive—over any other group’s or school’s
or coterie’s—influence on ME and what I present
in this multitude of virtual pages, and elsewhere—
save for perhaps my own personal poem-swap
compatriots (I so miss you all, from my elders
in Jamaica Plain to my colleagues on those many
weekend mornings at Anza Vista to the swaps at
my short-term bachelor pad on Bush to the decade
plus of regular swap-meets up the block and catty-
corner at Pine and Mason—and how could I mean
these many important diversions to not only divert
from what I’m trying to say but muddy it up, this
truth I feel I am divulging, to cast doubt on it, but
that would be silly of me to do, wouldn’t it? Esp
ecially since John Ashbery’s bricolage of stanzas
and sentences DO, surely, more than anyone
else’s, catalyze so many of these that I fold up
into little paper airplanes for which to bombard
you with so regularly. Which is a bit of a sullen
if not just downright offensiven metaphor, I
suppose. My pieces as airplanes that crash some
where onto your body. Enough so that you can
feel it, so that it makes an impact? There’d be
casualties, then. Let’s make a pact that those
who don’t survive the impact are just metaphors,
like the worst lines I happen to write. Don’t
kill them all off, please. Well, how nice it’d
be to have given you a little of me or at
least something that is somewhat real,
that you might keep—if for no other
reason than to remember me by.
