John
Ashbery's "Houseboat Days" - first-sentence-only lazy
appropriation artist edition.
1.
one died, and the soul was wrenched out of the other in life, who,
walking the streets wrapped in an identity like a coat, sees on and
on the same corners, volumetrics, shadows under trees.
2.
they all came, some wore sentiments emblazoned on t-shirts,
proclaiming the lateness of the hour, and indeed the sun slanted its
rays through branches of norfolk island pine as though politely
clearing its throat.
3.
sometimes a word would start it, like hands and feet, sun and gloves.
4.
you can have whatever you want.
5.
the tests are good.
6.
out here on cottage grove it matters.
7.
the tires slowly came to a rubbery stop
8.
there is no reason for the surcharge to bother you.
9.
she liked the blue drapes.
10.
the luxury of now is that the cancelled gala has been put back in.
11.
you thought it was wrong.
12.
the disquieting muses again: what are "leftovers"?
13.
it's this crazy weather we've been having: falling foward one minute,
lying down the next among the loose grasses and soft, white, nameless
flowers.
14.
at the sign "fred muffin's antiques" they turned off the
road into a narrow lane lined with shabby houses.
15.
a little girl with scarlet enameles fingernails asks me what time it
is - evidently that's a toy wristwatch she's wearing, for fun.
16.
for a long time i used to get up early.
17.
the conception is interesting: to see, as though reflected in
streaming windowpanes, the look of others through their own eyes.
18.
some departure from the norm will occur as time grows more open about
it.
19.
something strange is creeping across me.
20.
the code-name losses and contemplations float in and around us
through the window.
21.
like an object whose loss has begun to be felt though not yet
noticed, your pulsar signals to the present death.
22.
the lace of spoken breathing fades quite quickly, becomes something
it has no part in, the chairs and the mugs used by the new young
tenants, whose glance is elsewhere.
23.
the skin is broken.
24.
all through the fifties and sixties the land tilted toward the bowl
of life.
25.
for the disciple nothing had changed.
26.
a sudden, acrid smell of roses, and the urchin turns away, tears
level in the eyes.
27.
you can't say it that way anymore.
28.
the medieval town, with frieze of boy scouts from nagoya?
29.
and others, vaguer presences are built out of the meshing of life and
space at the point where we are wholly revealed in the lozenge-shaped
openings.
30.
i teach in a high school and see the nurses in some of the hospitals,
and if all teachers are like that maybe i can give you a buzz some
day, maybe we can get together for lunch or coffee or something?
31.
the kinds of thing are more important than the individual thing,
though the specific is supremely interesting.
32.
i saw a cottage in the sky.
33.
to you my friend who was in this street once were on it getting in
with it getting on with it though only passing by a smell of
hamburgers that day an old mattress and a box spring as it darkened
filling the empty rumble of a street in decay.
34.
although i mean it, and project the meaning as hard as i can into its
brushed-metal surface, it cannot, in this deteriorating climate, pick
up where i leave off.
35.
like a serpent among roses, like an asp among withered thornapples i
coil to and at you.
36.
long ago was the then beginning to seem like now as now is but the
setting out on a new but still undefined way.
37.
the buildings, piled so casually behind each other, are "suggestions
which, while only suggestions, we hope you will take seriously."
38.
orpheus liked the glad personal quality of the things beneath the
sky.
39.
be it right or wrong, these men among others in the park, all those
years in the cold, are a plain kind of thing: bands of acanthus and
figpeckers.
