Terebess
Asia Online (TAO)
Index
Home
John Ashbery (1927-)
37
Haiku
Old-fashioned shadows hanging down, that difficulty in love too soon
Some star or other went out, and you, thank you for your book and year
Something happened in the garage and I owe it for the blood traffic
Too low for nettles but it is exactly the way people think and feel
And I think there's going to be even more but waist-high
Night occurs dimmer each time with the pieces of light smaller and squarer
You have original artworks hanging on the walls oh I said edit
You nearly undermined the brush I now place againts the ball field arguing
That love was a round place and will still be there two years from now
And it is a dream sailing in a dark unprotected cove
Pirates imitate the ways of ordinary people myself for instance
Planted over and over that land has a bitter aftertaste
A blue anchor grains of grit in a tall sky sewing
He is a monster like everyone else but what do you if you're a monster
Like him feeling him come from far away and then go down to his car
The wedding was enchanted everyone was glad to be in it
What trees, tools, why ponder socks on the premises
Come to the edge of the barn the property really begins there
In a smaller tower shuttered and put away there
You lay aside your hair like a book that is too important to read now
Why did witches pursue the beast from the eight sides of the country
A pencil on glassshattered! The water runs down the drain
In winter sometimes you see those things and also in summer
A child must go down it must stand and last
Too late the last express passes through the dust of gardens
A vestthere is so much to tell about even in the side rooms
Hesitantly, it built up and passed quickly without unlocking
There are some places kept from the others and are separate, they never exist
I lost my ridiculous accent without acquiring another
In Buffalo, Buffalo she was praying, the nights stick together like pages in an old book
The dreams descend like cranes on gilded, forgetful wings
What is the past, what is it all for? A mental sandwich?
Did you say, hearing the schooner overhead, we turned back to the weir?
In rags and crystals, sometimes with a shred of sense, an odd dignity
The box must have known the particles fell through the house after him
All in all we were taking our time, the sea returnedno more pirates
I inch and only sometimes as far as the twisted pole gone in spare color
(originally appeared in Sulfur #5 [1981] and was included in Ashberys book A Wave [Viking, 1984])