Ron Padgett

 

 

Reading Reverdy

The wind that went through the head left it plural.
                    •
The half-erased words on the wall of bread.
                    •
Someone is grinding the color of ears.
She looks like and at her.
                    •
A child draws a man and the earth 
Is covered with snow.
                    •
He comes down out of the night 
When the hills fall.
                    •
The line part of you goes out to infinity.
                    •
I get up on top of an inhuman voice.

Vladimir Nabokov

“I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff -and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.
And from the inside, too, I'd duplicate
Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:
Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass
Hang all the furniture above the grass,
And how delightful when a fall of snow
Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so
As to make chair and bed exactly stand
Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!”

― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

James Schuyler

 

 Destitute Peru

For John Ashbery

We pullmaned to Peoria. Was

Gladys glad, Skippy missed

Sookie so. So Peru-ward, home.

“I’ll sew buttons on dresses yet.”

Nike’s peach-knife nicked little

finger Chinese straw finger-cuffed

to Minna’s Siamesed. Hartford,

how are your wheres, our whens?

Or extirpated traumas’ gifted

guilt smothered aboard a club

car. Lake Ontario spilled

Jo Jo’s knapsack: “Pasternak.”

An alligator ate an alligator-

trapping monkey. We ate because

“it’s dark, it’s air-conditioned”

like lurching to the movies,

shot marbles in lobbies. What

interests? Takes? Escapes? Eat,

moth-light, part and apart, slowly

we slow waiters serve hot plates.

John Ashbery

 "Some Trees"

These are amazing: each 
Joining a neighbor, as though speech 
Were a still performance. 
Arranging by chance

To meet as far this morning 
From the world as agreeing 
With it, you and I 
Are suddenly what the trees try

To tell us we are: 
That their merely being there 
Means something; that soon 
We may touch, love, explain.

And glad not to have invented 
Such comeliness, we are surrounded: 
A silence already filled with noises, 
A canvas on which emerges

A chorus of smiles, a winter morning. 
Placed in a puzzling light, and moving, 
Our days put on such reticence 
These accents seem their own defense.

James Schuyler

Frank O'Hara chats
apart with Carole Lombard
and James Dean while
John O'Hara makes 
whoopee at a dignified 
gait with Scott Fitz-
gerald and Nathanael
West. And where is 
Papa? Honking where
the wild goose goes...
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