john ashbery's your name here "Like Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats, and Wallace Stevens before him, John Ashbery augments in poetic splendor in his seventies.  Your Name Here joins Hardy's Winter Words, Yeat's Last Poems and Plays, and Steven's The Rock as one of the enduring monuments in the language."                                                                                                                          --Harold Bloom

NOT YOU AGAIN Thought I'd write you this poem.  Yes, I know you don't need it. No, you don't have to thank me for it. Just want to get it off my chest and drop it in the peanut dust. You came at me and that was something. I was more than a match for you, you were a match for me, we undid the clasps in our shirtings, it was a semblance of all right. Then the untimely muse got wind of it. Picked it up, hauled it over there. The bandy-legged man was watching all this time. "...to have Betty back on board." Now it's time for love-twenty. Assume your places on the shuffleboard. You, Sam, must make a purple prayer out of origami and stuff it.  If you've puked it's already too late. I see all behind me small canyons, drifting, filling up with the space of drifting. The chair in the attic is up to no good. Then you took me and held me like I was a child or a prize.  For a moment there I thought I knew you, but you backed away, wiping your specs, "Oh, excuse..." It's okay, will come another time when stupendous seabirds are carilloning out over the Atlantic, when the charging fire engine adjusts its orange petticoats after knocking down the old man the girl picks up. Now it's too late, the books are closed, the salmon no longer spewing.  Just so you know.

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THE FORTUNE COOKIE CRUMBLES You have a kind and gentle nature.  Not overly challenged more than once.  The "small things" matter once you've replaced the dish on the shelf and moved very convincingly toward the door. "Just dying for attention," you've been around the block yourself a few times, paid the bills and furniture. You were a tulip in some past life, it says here.  You have "two lips," as winy and luscious as a Chevy in your dad's garage. On a sorry note, your correspondent notes that you have a tendency to fly off to Europe at the slightest provocation.  Must mean you're getting old, or "devoid of charm" is maybe what it says. It is likely that a viable present can be brokered. Your past is all used up now, anyway. The lilies love you more than ever now, it seems. I love you too, but my brow is furrowed. I mean, what am I going to tell my shoe? ONION SKIN In the end it was their tales of warring stampedes that finished us off.  We could not go them one better and they knew it, and put our head on a stamp. "Then I should have some pain, too?"

CROSSROADS IN THE PAST That night the wind stirred in the forsythia bushes, but it was a wrong one, blowing in the wrong direction. "That's silly.  How can there be a wrong direction? 'It bloweth where it listeth,' as you know, just as we do when we make love or do something else there are no rules for." I tell you, something went wrong there a while back. Just don't ask me what it was. Pretend I've dropped the subject. No, now you've got me interested, I want to know exactly what seems wrong to you, how something could seem wrong to you.  In what way do things get to be wrong? I'm sitting here dialing my cellphone with one hand, digging at some obscure pebbles with my shovel with the other. And then something like braids will stand out, on horsehair cushions. That armchair is really too lugubrious. We've got to change all the furniture, fumigate the house, talk our relationship back to its beginnings.  Say, you know that's probably what's wrong -- the beginnings concept, I mean. I aver there are no beginnings, though there were perhaps some sometime. We'd stopped, to look at the poster the movie theater had placed freestanding on the sidewalk.  The lobby cards drew us in.  It was afternoon, we found ourselves sitting at the end of a row in the balcony; the theater was unexpectedly crowded.  That was the day we first realized we didn't fully know our names, yours or mine, and we left quietly amid the gray snow falling.  Twilight had already set in.