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In the Studio
I’ve always tried to work by addition and not subtraction.
Start
And because I’m a taker by nature, / I am suspicious, exhausted, on guard / against tax refunds, friendships, erasures
Sacred and Profane Dances: New Prose Poems by John Ashbery
The words can suddenly turn to vapor or stones. They have a way of wriggling out of our grasp just when we thought to touch them. This can happen to the wise as well as to the foolish.
ATTAINDER
This evil that I feel, that I taste, that makes the roads slick, is there no end, no fruition to it? It comes from somewhere, sufficient to find out where.
Sacred and Profane Dances
The words can suddenly turn to vapor or stones. They have a way of wriggling out of our grasp just when we thought to touch them. This can happen to the wise as well as to the foolish.
Tempest
As usual Tempest’s strands were many. In conversation she was like a fisherman with a number of lines which she was constantly checking, to see if some unlucky bullhead or catfish might have gone for the bait.
At 4 a.m. Snow
Earth stands / on end, listening. / The acid sun turns on / limes green
Via Negativa
He feels such an urge to make things mean, / including his mood. He’s had that longing, / drunk or sober, all his life.
Zach’s Mystery, and Others
We remember how we’d drink with him, and more / than half our gang are dead as he is now.
The Mushrooms
I’d read that they were edible, so, using both hands, I plucked one from the ground and carried it inside, where I moved it, slowly, from the table to the fridge and then back outside.
Go Back and Fetch It
“Literature…can hold up those things that mainstream society doesn’t believe: that Black people are there. One of my jobs is just holding that up to the light so that everyone can see that they’re there.”
How to Visit a Museum: Disciplines of Availability
I’m waiting for that strange experience when a picture speaks, sometimes in a whisper, sometimes with a shout, sometimes with a reverberating silence that pulls me to the edge of a precipice where I’m not sure whether I’ll fall or fly.
The Heart of the Grandstand
The racetrack, famously built before we knew of such things, straddled a fault line at the joint of two very active plates. As a result, fissures spread through the walls of the old grandstand like capillaries. The world was tearing it apart naturally.
The New Fear
Our blood sugar was so high that our wounds
had stopped healing. We were either a tapestry
of Band-Aids or very careful.
The Boundary Waters
One second he was riding on the river and the next he was in it, watching his canoe float away upside down, its silvery hull a bright line on the dark river.
Scandinavian Grim
When my mother said
Linda
and looked that look, I could
see it all before me.
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