Suffering from a complete absence of ideas, and the first game of 
football I`ve played since last summer, I send into the hiatus one of 
my favourite Coolidge poems, one with a rare venom, from Odes of 
Roba, The Figures, 1991:

                                         Ashbery Explains


The people on the next block over from yours, you know?
Sounds traduced from ceiling to ceiling
to thought that won`t admit of a washer replaced
without dousing all and sundry in sand and a mild solution
of pinks and reeds, hard sodium, the cap off the tube
he stood and he said, and he lay long and he thought
his mind encompassed, his perimeter taken in a bit
everybody talking at once but only one thread assorted
from it all a parrot reproduced on call

Out on a rooftop head down timing the sun
wishing it hadn`t all come easy to such a rinse
living in a chipper vacuum of donuts chatting and jotting
and walking and salting the numbers coming up on the surface
of a silky phone, how can you store
all the bones of one time a leavening for
the canceled strikes in bridled strokes
I pick a pen from room of cobbled stacks
and head for Mars, Saturn

Add the epithet "farm", north and to the sum of that place
and you have the counting drama, away from which we reside
   but not
as anonymous kinds, drops of the goblin into the proper
   reservoir
it would be bogus continuing just to continue nonetheless
renders us very much against the day hell became a lover
of the spinal stanzas, he came, he didn`t grow there
by the act of remaining there, mortal and hatless
strolled right down into the river the message takes
reason is plenty and we stake our obligations on it
but not our sayings, those tremble in a wind of 
the reminding of focus, or a difficult shadow of
a pretty death, one`s arm contrasts with any
of several reactive poems, ones taken up now but
not yet broken into, the clearest brush
will line the ledge with a conscious magic and absolve us
ink at an end and later on that day

Perhaps the he he is is
not explainable by the you you
have always mixed feelings with
the identity a gloomy and barren place for
a metaphor, the first field or last vice
or stanza containing dish or fish or sky
running with milk, or dots to the end
then dash and the initials responsible

A poem is larger than the situation
of one held longer than it actually is
though plenty would just continue
the salt charred under a lamp arm or
low sun the review couldn`t be bothered with
one feeling ever borne out since its origin?
but close enough to the line if you are
the right person playing it or messenger
casting aside the bay leaf for death with a difference

Here and now Captain Specific is staring placidly
at an object
to an absolute halt, wrapping yard and sky
in needlework and frosting, binding energy
on the vastness of a stall
but he cannot reveal it
has not the language for it, is
unable to receive a thing

Gradually substances pall beyond the perimeter
the tin mine is rotting in honey
the strew of loam edges toward the oceans
the alleys echo themselves sour, clattering ink falls
toads clear the earth, it is perhaps
little enough that the fish of chalk is regained in light
that no thought is wasted on everything
everywhere and not at all in sole declension

But the poem prefers death and milk in contrasting stanzas
and now that I am here I feel it is all about
simply living, not looking for something else
the miles marked up on the trunks, or anything lucid
that anyone objectively drops, these or suitably ringing
others are mates to my nut`s fattening, stated
the harmful chap pleasantly who just shared your most
recent and addling repast, he is the one to ask
the graduate who stands just outside the palace of remedies
and asks himself another for every one of yours
constant piecemeal and won`t budge


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