Beverly of Graustark

American Poetry Review, The, May/Jun 1999 by Ashbery, John

It's wind, it's raining.

It's real adventure. It hasn't happened yet.

It's time to break for lunch

half a bean sandwich. Yours isn't here yet,

you asked for black bread on bacon.

The perp is becoming abusive,

and I would like a chiller, wind

in my pants, my long taffeta gown,

to take me anywhere from any place

before this insane excursion is finished. Please

the seamstress is inside down below.

The president of Slavonia is on the wire:

We'll have to go ahead with the order for flatbed trucks

now stretching far into the offended distance.

Stop! Some other way may be found

That's what you think, sister

Now will you please punch my ticket

so we can go back to sleep and begin dreaming again.

The day extracts as it contains, in a loosely confining way,

what these pills were about,

and what they were supposed to absorb before your seconds arrived

and now it's too late to include the meeting

it would only baffle the establishment.

Yes but what I am hearing is from plazas of wailing

tilting back into the bland exposure of it,

the idle secret. It was again a lunch of sandwiches,

but truth will perforate. As sadly as I'm

in your line of vision, Venice is closed,

another browser sidles in

through a snow of ecstatic fleas,

what my alma mater is all about I think I said once.

Photographs of members enjoin us through the back seat

on a spring day once; green grass and toilets

spooled on a little anticipation.

"Nelly"-that's all I needed and we're off again, down foul alleys

ending in meticulous squares, and none of us knew the outcome yet.

We could see the blue ice slick clear through the Turkish uniform,

and the bowling alleys ended out in the garden as is right

and proper.

Poor Beverly-they never gave her (him?) a chance

to prove herself in the journals of the East End

before being summoned to that rocky principality

from which no bulletins ever issue-only brickbats

and the occasional red herring press release: "collapsed

felt underdrawers are invading the season, counsels

Leopoldine from Phalsbourg, but don't

dare disguise those shoulder pads yet. Instead, why not

think rotting horseflesh this year? Some beaux even prefer it

to the spritzed violets so common underfoot

these days of walking back to the gate post

where everything began, inconceivably it seems, in light-"

a fiery bazaar no one needs to talk too much about any more

until the next in the round of visits occurs.

It's incredible though how few latent oblivions have been canceled

we're back on track at least as far as

late returns are concerned. Most of them are in.

A few hotel ghosts wander stiffly, wondering if catarrh

can ever be cathartic, and if there's an afterlife, and if so,

whether it's near as the next room, or closet even,

which might just be preferable to daytime's sloping agendas,

the roof at night, the rent, and the violet pallor flooding us now always.

My poor little face, you said.

No real need to reply.