Another Convention

A Tribute to John Ashbery: An Imitation of “The Other Tradition”

[Another Convention]

They all went, some wore snagged notions
Braided into their hems, whispering the haste
Of the era, and indeed Jupiter spits its rocks
From the wrought-iron black balcony while
Apologetically dabbing its mouth, and all emotions shuffle
In the dirt under the stairs when she’s sweeping:
The eternal flow of traffic, the blisters,
The nostalgic Mickey Mouse waffles, and through it
The whistle of my generation streaking conscientiously into farces
Confusing night, dripping sex into syrup at every moment
Past the telescope: the wrong end of it all.
Only then did you stare into the television,
Unable to focus the billions of pixels taking their place, or
Scribble the subliminal. More beds
Were brought, and light bulbs smashed, but the sounds
Tattled on its waves so that no one heard how it happened
After Jesus waited outside. People on the first
Circus tightrope, squatting up and down, until splitting
Five hundred decibels across the horizon
And the show was canceled on Ohio’s border.
The string on my finger
Says they lost you, after a shower, in your tented towel,
Literate as a mosquito in a doctor’s office.
The tightrope life was higher then. Swaying, each of the
Gypsies has a new fortune for philanthropists
Who weren’t steady enough to finish, forfeiting their costumes
To the event, and how, though spectators
Wrung their towels dry, if only to nearly
Fly away, yet still bogged down in a dreary faker
After that stuffy self-awareness years before,
Now the song of the street has muted itself
Over the magnanimity of the spectacle. You found this
Perfunctory, and stuck up your eyelids toward the lamp,
Painting your pictures on the globe, not seeing
Or caring, although everything must die musically
And all things released, told yes and no
Caught in and out of the twisted iron bars
They have so much trouble remembering when your
Forgetting
Redeems them at once, as the moon claims the sky.