In Honor of John Ashbery's 80th Birthday

His science of incoherence woke me back up to a world
Where Southwestern burlap sheets lead to raspberry coffee
Then a vacuum like an air raid alert circa 1943
Then a Walmart trip that could be described as 100 different trips...
It goes on like this literally forever.
This has replaced the God of my Fathers,
The once-neon motel pallets along Route 66 of old
Where pilgrims used to go to take pictures for books;

My thumb was bloodied flipping through his catalogue of words
Of hyper-hip rapture to the quotidian,
A palimpsest of fastidious fragments lost in time and space,
Where damsel change is always chased by lord consciousness
Trying to tag the poetry of motion with sense,

Where every random phrase is packaged up and pitched as if on eBay,
Where enigmas rise and fall like rainbows (not real rainbows,
But pictures you’ve seen of them from expired books);
All the hard, hot physical can be scissored up, collage-style
As if the random is not perfect as it is, but should be stripped,
By the wordsmith's trade, further into elegant whimsy,
To thereby further force the meaning of it all to be resisted
By a mind that gets drunk on the stuff.

The clearest statements of what is right and real and true
Are dropped like ironic hints
While the subject of the poem is found in things
Picked and discarded along its side
—The Appa-la-chin mountains, the Nehi children laughing—
The depth is all in how the surface refuses to yield
Though a blowtorch mind has tried to pierce it
Before saying with a smile, sweat and burns flaring:
"Isn't it cool how anything can happen at anytime?"

Is he striding atop this constantly morphing age,
Or is he, like me, like all of us
Caught in its delicious undertow?
For his unsolvable puzzle can’t quite cover his desire
For his own order, for something he could capture
Like a trophy lion in clearer days could be caught
By a khaki-clad, pith-helmeted Brit with a lisp.