Bled Weasel, The

American Poetry Review, The, Nov/Dec 2004 by Ashbery, John

Two shoes make a difference

to the man in the street. The"detention of the Magna Carta

was forever but it's over now.

Three Greek youths pass. "Have a good one."

And I, contorted as I am . . .

First I repaired to the almshouse,

then to a nearby distillery. Sure and if it ain't

the baby's comic death, we'll come no more

nor promise what we had seen.

Erect on its parasol

the caterpillar predicted three more months of gloom.

Chatty figures lurked about. There was nothing

much anyone could do. We spread jam on it

which helped, but only a little. More ogres from the other side

crossed over to ours. Glowworms circulated

under the trees, confirmed by whimpering Dobermans, yet

all was somehow lightness and ease. The wealth of nations

floated into our laps, as though there had never been a housing crisis,

or as if we, all of us, had invented a kind of shelter

unmentioned in the glossy manuals.

The ark is a type of tree, you said, and he breathed

fury into my face."That was in the time when it was just as well

to be, having been, and all the vagrant notions of our past

collapsed in a crazy quilt of expired pageantry.