Tuesday, January 17, 2006

I had a dream about a thief

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3 comments:

  1. Lori Witzel7:30 AM

    Saw this, and thought it very spot-on.
    *************************
    The Improvement
    by John Ashbery

    Is that where it happens?
    Only yesterday when I came back, I had this
    diaphanous disaffection for this room, for spaces,
for the whole sky and whatever lies beyond.
I felt the eggplant, then the rhubarb.
Nothing seems strong enough for
    this life to manage, that sees beyond
into particles forming some kind of entity—
    so we get dressed kindly, crazy at the moment.
A life of afterwords begins.

    We never live long enough in our lives
to know what today is like.
Shards, smiling beaches,
    abandon us somehow even as we converse with them.
And the leopard is transparent, like iced tea.

    I wake up, my face pressed
    in the dewy mess of a dream. It mattered,
    because of the dream, and because dreams are by nature sad
even when there's a lot of exclaiming and beating
as there was in this one. I want the openness
    of the dream turned inside out, exploded
into pieces of meaning by its own unasked questions,
    beyond the calculations of heaven. Then the larkspur
would don its own disproportionate weight,
and trees return to the starting gate. 
See, our lips bend.

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  2. Lori Witzel7:32 AM

    And all the line-breaks were munged -- my apologies, but you'll need to hunt up the orginal poem at http://www.favoritepoem.org/poems/ashbery/index.html

    ReplyDelete
  3. Andy Spiegel10:24 AM

    That's what happens when you try to steal a few winks.

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for stopping by! :-)

Willie

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