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| Frank O'Hara & John Ashbery [The Junk Drawer of Shawn's Mind] |
from John Ashbery's Chinese Whispers:
The Decals in
the Hallway
remanded Margery
to an earlier contingency:
Sir Isaac fishing
for compliments
in troubled
waters, and like that. In a flash, a star
o’erspread their
terrestrial inhibitions. Mother’s
hairnet came
unknotted. She dabbled in bliss
all her life,
early knew perfection’s spiteful sting.
He’d imbibed his
father-in-law’s authority
as though it were
ichor. Sometimes, transplanted
to the
elephant’s-foot umbrella stand
in the vestibule,
he’d curse children and the impossible
trail of
conundrums they leave behind. It’d
be just like him,
she thought, to leave
on the eve of the
midnight of their secrecy,
secretly planning
to be around next morning
when the gulls had
drifted away and the engines given
out.
And sweet it was
to contemplate the immediate
future of
immediacy. Iris and the little ones had run out onto the street,
cries came from
the corner, like dishes falling
absentmindedly
against each other.
Another corker,
she planned. Instead
the call went out:
Diversify! And in so doing
casually assuage
some of your dopiest penchants. Here,
the anesthetized
markets of the world await,
prostrate, time’s
scalpel’s hobson-jobson,
while ninnies
panic under the pancake tree, touting wired panaceas,
spillovers of
earlier attractions, tie-in deals
with the Old One
himself.
Cool invitations
now apply.
Every faction
would like to own its own behavior,
though we weren’t
being modern just then. Far from it:
We were thinking
money shots in Piazzola plazas
of retching grief,
where not one codicil reaches striplinghood
unsieved. Yet the
hole that encounters a crater
knows which
antidote to swallow. Lord Henry waded far out
into the crabs’
private estuary, yet the water never grazed his knees.
The sun-driven
sky’s paisley was as good as perjured; as collateral
it had probably
peaked; yet who precisely are these camp followers,
and what is it
that they think we have done that they want to ask us about?
As one protuberant
pubescent I was tossed, over and over again in a blanket.
Sometimes I think
I live there still. Certain declivities interested me then,
made me think
about grad school, if only
to get away from
the archaic rumblings.
I’d face an
Everest of chilblains just to insinuate myself
with the wolf, one
more time. They told us he was out, not to wait.
The joke was on
them, they said.
They’ll be back
soon.
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| Sir Henry Yule [Wikipedia] |
ADAM’S APPLE.
This name (Pomo d’Adamo)
is given at Goa to the fruit of the Mimusops
Elengi,
Linn. (Birdwood);
and in the 1635 ed. of Gerarde’s Herball
it is applied to the Plantain. But in earlier days it was applied to
a fruit of the Citron kind. — (See Marco
Polo,
2nd ed., i. 101), and the following:
c.
1580. — “In his hortis (of Cairo) ex arboribus virescunt mala
citria, aurantia, limonia sylvestria et domestica poma
Adami
vocata.” — Prosp.
Alpinus, i.
16.
c.
1712. — “It is a kind of lime or citron tree . . . it is called
Pomum Adami,
because
it has on its rind the appearance of two bites, which the simplicity
of the ancients imagined to be the vestiges of the impression which
our forefather made upon the forbidden fruit. . . .” Bluteau,
quoted by Tr. of Alboquerque,
Hak. Soc. i. 100. The fruit has nothing to do with zamboa,
with which Bluteau and Mr. Birth connect it. See JAMBOO.
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