CONCAVE
SELF PORTRAIT IN A CONCAVE MIRROR
You’re probably covered with a tarpaulin now
Laying in state in the back of a flatbed truck
On your way to Rochester You lived with your
physicist grandfather there I quoted you in my
1st Collection In the poem: Deny Deny Deny on
page 75
I tried each thing only some were immortal and free
I didn’t really understand your poetry at first
John Ashbery But then it dawned on me that if
I stopped trying to read for meaning I would glean
your code The human mind craves knowing
Knowing if there is a jaguar in the bushes restless for
my sprackled skin + plump calves (no they are not)
I will make a boney breakfast +he will have to eat my
shrunken brother too
You died yesterday at 90 so now your poetry about the:
experience of the experience has died too They say there
are zillions of pretenders to your throne But I footnoted
you And though I may steal from Shakespeare outright
Never you (except for today’s title which I bastardized)
My own self portrait is in the midst of a make-over John
Soul about to do back flips after scunnered by so much grief
New face almost unrecognizable Especially when in the throes
of denial re: a recurring dream of some 50+ years One is
tempted not to go there but much more tempted to
My husband has developed a fondness for our nanny In the
emptiness of late afternoon And has left me She is now having
their 3rd baby And when I awake +tell him this there is an interest
He says: After I read your poems I am always a bit puzzled
Later when I drive by the café where he was to have been I think of
John Ashbery scrunched into the interstices between heaven+earth
His dark trousers + silver hair full of dirt And of how we will all have
to get along without each other now
__
TARPAULIN
Easing the thing
Into spurts of activity
Before the emptiness of late afternoon
Is a kind of will power
Blaring back its received vision
From a thousand tenement windows
Just before night
Its signal fading
No one has the last laugh.
(RIP John Ashbery Self Portait In A Convex Mirror 1975)
(PulitzerPrize National Book Award National Book Critics Award
Griffin Poetry Prize)
Fall 2017
