Sunday, December 19, 2010

They're right, of course

for Bruce


It's going to change their army.
They were just never entitled to 
their army.


Now it's the other shoe
that needs to drop. And
I don't mean the DoMA.
I mean their waging wars
with a cult and not a draft.
So easy.




But sometimes they get, you know, confused,
and change their vows or the ground rules
that sustain all of us. It's cheery, then, to reflect on the past
and what it brought us. To take stone books down

from the shelf. It is good, in fact,
to let the present pass without commentary
for what it says about the future.
There was nothing carnal in the way omens became portents.





John Ashbery
Are you ticklish?
  A Worldly Country
Harper Collins, 2007©
  

3 comments:

  1. You have a beautiful and thoughtful blog. The words and pictures work so well together. Keep up the good work.

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  2. Well, then! It's nice to feel one is thinking of someone else -- time of year and all. Thank you.

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  3. Thank You for bringing me back to him--to Ashbery. For the past few days I been reading Paul Blackburn's "The Journals" (Black Sparrow Press)

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