Saturday commute civ: That, and a very good eddy

  I always feel the 

  thing to go for 

  is speed.

                        

P.G. Wodehouse

  Interview with Gerald Clarke

  Paris Review©

    The Art of Fiction No. 60

  Winter, 1975

iii  Hermès, 2012©

An inconvenience

       I know, it's late.
       Please understand,
       it's why I'm here.

Once a hobbledehoy

  ..
  and just as our way is flat across
  Dales and gulches, as though our train were a pencil

  Guided by a ruler held against a photomural of the Alps
  We both come to see distance as something unofficial
  And impersonal yet not without its curious justification
  ..

  Only the wait in stations is vague and
  Dimensionless, like oneself. How do they decide how much
  Time to spend in each? One begins to suspect there's no
  Rule or that it's applied haphazardly.

Right in the middle of a

stately, searching poem,

one will feel release to

laugh where the phrasing

or the tempo says, "OK."

Is this because, we know

a poem wants more of us,

and is a merry vengeance

part of what it expects?

I honestly happen to be-

lieve, thinking strictly

as a rower, such release

is the finer moment of a

blade's recurring sweep. 

In the assimilation of a

new work of sound, more-

over, it's irrepressible

to pursue its adaptation

to one's own conditions,

adventurously to own it, 

even as its autonomy re-

veals itself. Poetry has

it easy, and yet nothing

else can have it harder.

What one can envy in the

poet, is that he's where

we like to be, composing

invitations to his home.

That needs gorgeousness.

Ah, where is it, for me,

except inside a rule ap-

plied haphazardly?

  In the wearying and world-weary clouds of steam like great

  White apples, might I just through proximity and aping

  Of postures and attitudes communicate this concern of mine

  To them? That their jagged attitudes correspond to mine,

  That their beefing strikes answering silver bells within

  My own chest, and that I know, as they do, how the last

  Stop is the most anxious one of all, though it means

  Getting home at last, to the pleasures and dissatisfactions

    of home?

John Ashbery

Houseboat Days

  Melodic Trains

  [fragment]

op. cit.

Come up, Southern Cross

  

News is of New Zealand
reconsidering the flag
again, the famous uni-
on jack in the canton,
stars of that southern
cross on the fly, out-
lined white over blue.

  For young people in
  wine there remain 2
  paradises, and both
  of great linkage to
  the seas. I hear, a
  Prime Minister fav-
  ours a silver fern,
  on a black field. I
  don't see paradise,
  in obscure foliage,
  much less radiance.



What is a country for,
I often wonder, if not
the fulfillment of the
patience of its stars?

  

They took an hour from my weekend

  

   they said I'd

   see it again,

     all the while

     pretending to

     keep it safe.

i  Hedi Slimane

Negotiations we recall

   Don't let me be happy  

   I agree to be secure.