Description

Breathlike

Just as the day could use another hour,
I need another idea. Not a concept
or a slogan. Something more like a rut
made thousands of years ago by one of the first
wheels as it rolled along. It never came back
to see what it had done, and the rut
just stayed there, not thinking of itself
or calling attention to itself in any way.
Sun baked it. Water stood, or rather sat
in it. Wind covered it with dust, then blew it
away. Always it was available to itself
when it wished to be, which wasn't often.

Then there was a cup and ball theory
I told you about. A lot of people had left the coast.
Squirt conditions obtained. I forgot I overwhelmed you
once upon a time, between everybody's sound sleep
and waking afterward, trying to piece together
what had happened. The rut glimmered
through centuries of snow and after.
I suppose it was trying to make some point
but we never found out about that,
having come to know each other years later
when our interest in zoning had revived again.

About the Author

John Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. He earned degrees from Harvard and Columbia, and went to France as a Fulbright Scholar in 1955, living there for much of the next decade. His many collections include Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems (2007), which was awarded the International Gri=n Poetry Prize. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) won the three major American prizes—the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award—and an early book, Some Trees (1956), was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series. The Library of America published the first volume of his collected poems in 2008. Active in various areas of the arts throughout his career, he has served as executive editor of Art News and as art critic for New York magazine and Newsweek. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1988 to 1999. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships and was a MacArthur Fellow from 1985 to 1990. His work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages. He lives in New York.

Praise for Planisphere: New Poems…

“Deeply pleasurable...Ashbery still has his ear to the ground, he’s still listening, and the results are fun, funny, often wise, sometimes brilliant...”
-BookForum

“Ashbery helms a keen awareness of himself throughout...If he’s repetitive, it’s in the way that a beach is repetitive with sand, or the night sky is repetitive with stars.”
-Boston Phoenix

” [Ashbery’s] productivity has done nothing to diminish his legendary inscrutability, not sap his notorious zest for playing havoc with nearly every convention and fixed idea about poetry under the sun.”
-Boston Globe