#shadow train

Or in My Throat

To the poet as a basement quilt, but perhaps To some reader a latticework of regrets, through which You can see the funny street, with the ends of cars and the dust, The thing we always forget to put in.  For him        

The two ends were the same except that he was in one Looking at the other, and all his grief stemmed from that: There was no way of appreciating anything else, how polite People were for instance, and the dream, reversed, became        

A swift nightmare of starlight on frozen puddles in some Dread waste.  Yet you always hear How they are coming along.  Someone always has a letter From one of them, asking to be remembered to the boys, and all.         That’s why I quit and took up writing poetry instead. It’s clean, it’s relaxing, it doesn’t squirt juice all over Something you were certain of a minute ago and now your own face Is a stranger and no one can tell you it’s true.  Hey, stupid!

What with the Masters starting today:

This protected summer of high, white clouds, a new golf star

Flashes like confetti across the intoxicating early part

Of summer, almost to the end of August.   

                   - Qualm

Ambrosius, suffering from misfortune, seeks happiness in the       companionship of Joe, and in playing golf.

                   - ...by an Earthquake

Now, according to some sources,

new golfing trends are a commodity

along with silence, and sweetness.

Doucement, doucement...

                    - Strange Cinema

And when an elf

sits on a golf tee before you, and someone

behind you asks to play through: then, then

it doesn't matter much which of the old gypsy crones is

really a princess in disguise, with flowing

chocolate braids, and olive-dusted complexion!

by John Ashberry

This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level.

Look at it talking to you. You look out a window

Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don't have it.

You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other.

The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot.

What's a plain level? It is that and other things,

Bringing a system of them into play. Play?

Well, actually, yes, but I consider play to be

A deeper outside thing, a dreamed role-pattern,

As in the division of grace these long August days

Without proof. Open-ended. And before you know

It gets lost in the steam and chatter of typewriters.

It has been played once more. I think you exist only

To tease me into doing it, on your level, and then you aren't there

Or have adopted a different attitude. And the poem