Ashbery John - Girls on the run : a poem

Then they come back in for a while. Then, in maybe a million years, they go out of fashion and stay there. Laure and Tidbit agreed, with the proviso that after that everyone would become fashion again for a few hours. Write it now, Tidbit said, before they get back. And, quivering, I took the pen. Drink the beautiful tea before you slop sewage over the horizon, the Principal directed.

OK, its calm now, but it wasnt two minutes ago. What do you want me to do, said Henry, I am no longer your serf, and if I was I wouldnt do your bidding. That is enough, sir. You think you can lord it over every last dish of oatmeal on this planet, Henry said. But wait till my ambition comes a cropper, whatever that means, or bursts into feathered bloom and burns on the shore. Then the kiddies dancing sidewise declared it a treat, and the ice-cream gnomes slurped their last that day.

Inside, in the twilit nest of evening, something was coming undone. Dimples could feel it, surging over her shoulder like a wave of energy. And then it was gone. No one had witnessed it but herself. And so Dimples took off for the city, which was near and wholesome. There, with her sister Larissa, she planned the big blue boat that future generations will live in, and thank us for.

It twitched at its steely moorings, and seemed to say: Live, like life, with me. Let the birds wash over them, Laure said, for what use are earmuffs in a snowstorm, except to call attention to distant tots who have strayed. And now the big Mother warms them, accepts them, for the nervous predicates they are. Far from the beach-fiends howling, their adventure nurses itself back to something like health. On the fifth day it takes a little blancmange and stands up, only to fall back into a hammock.

It had good things about it. Now, pretty as a moment, Tidbits housecoat sniffed the undecipherable, the knowable past. They were anxious to get back to work. Diane was looking relaxed. Then, some say, Pete said it was the afternoon backing up again, inexorable with dreams, looking for garbage to pick a fight with. My goodness! Do you suppose his blowholes ? Sometime later they returned with Pete and the others, he all excited, certain he had spotted a fuse this time.

Rags the mutt licked and yelped. Oh, get down! But Rags seemed to be on to something. And if they come through the alfalfa this time, well have a nice idea of where they are, of who these men are. If they abrade the abandoned silo, no one will be wiser. Look, their pastel tent, and flags made from the same substance, waving dehors Ive got to get an angle on this, a firm tack of some kind. Willingly, the flood washed over the day and so much that was complicated, from the past: the tiny doggy door Rags had made with a T-square, surplus sequins.

And if they dont want to play according to our rules, what then? Why, then well come up with something, like the sink-drain. Anyway, this is all just an excuse for you to leave your posts, toying with anagrams, while the real message is being written in the stars. To go ahead, it says, but be watchful for scouts in the corn shocks. This close to Halloween there are lots of little bumps around, and tea cosies to shroud them. Beware one last time; but as the spirit of going is to go, I cant control you, advise you much longer. Just keep on persevering, and then well know what we have done matters most to us.

With that, the sticks uprooted the tent. A thousand passions came unleashed, but fortunately for the girls, none of them were around to witness it they were off in a cage with the canaries. Now, though, when it came time to vote for who the deed was done by, the others mattered too. It was just their pot luck. Oh well, Laure offered, we were going to close down that shaftway anyway, and the subway came close: It was Mother and her veering playthings again, torn between the impossible alternatives of existing and saying no to menace. To everyones surprise the bus stopped.

Our stalwart little band of angels got on it, and were taken for a ride into the next chapter, a dim place of curlicues and bas-reliefs. If I had a handle, Laure thought.

She was at least sixty, had many skins covering her own, regal one. So then they all cry, at sea. The lawnmower is emitting sparks again, one doesnt know how many, or how much faster it will have to go to meet us at the Denizens by six oclock. Wed have been better off letting the prisoners stage their own war. Now I dont know so much, and with Aunt Jennie at my side we could release a few more bombs and not know it. Everywhere in the tangled schist someone was living, it seemed to say, this is my doing; whoever shall come afterward is a delusion.

And I went round the corner to say, Well it sure looks like an improvementhey, why dont you tie your shoes, and then your bonnet will be picture-perfect? No, only getting away has any value to her: A stones throw is better than a mile since one will have to be up again much later, and this way saves time. How often did you let your mother say, How did you get your Sundays packed away? And yet its always treasonable to be in the middle. Hm, there are objections to that, just as I thought. This might help. Yes. But the color of this paint is too fabulous, Id asked for something fragmented like sea-spray.

In that case we cannot be of service to you. Farewell. Now I had walked the terrible byways for what seemed like too long. Now another was following, insensately. Would there be foodstuffs on the steps? How did that ladder point into nowhere? Shuffle, you miser! Just so, Shuffle said, I dont want to be around when the gang erupts into centuries of inviolate privilege, and cisterns tumble down the side of the slope, and all is gone more or less naturally to hell. To which Dimples replied, Why not? Why not just give yourself, one time, to the floods of human resources that are our day? Because I dont want to live at an angle to the blokes who micromanage our territory, thats all.

Oh, who do you mean? Why, the red-trimmed zebras, Shuffle said, that people thinks is the cutest damn things in town until the victory bonfire on the square, and then theres more racing and chasing than you can shake a banjo-string at, and itll have muddled you over by the time the war has crested. He sat, eating a cheese sandwich, wondering if it would be his last, fiddled and sank away. And as far as the wires could stretch, into the inevitable jerk-kingdom, the little girl crawled on her hands and feet. That was no jack-in-the-box back there, that was the real thing. Yes, Stuart Hofnagel, they came to you, theyd expected big things of you back in Arkadelphia, and now you were a soured loner like anybody. Old town, you seem to remember otherwise.