“A free verse untyped poem in the style of John Ashbury”

As if sunlight could spin backward—  
The window, remembered,  
fills with undressings. One curtain  
disentangles another, yet the street  
below remains unclarified.  
You are assembling the thought lightly,  
as if it were feathers from a quarrelsome pillow,  
wishing the whole morning wider.

There are things written and not-written,  
catalogued or flung  
on the floor between the chair and the hope  
of sitting down once more. In this way,  
coffee, unfinished, marks the table—  
a comet passing in the language of stains.

Somewhere, a city is holding its revolution.  
Or maybe just someone’s laundry,  
a white flag undone by breeze.  
I listen for the clink of thought  
as it passes through  
the ill-transparent air of here,  
a shape both abstract and exacting,  
sidling past meaning’s polite doormen.

If I knew how to send you a letter  
I’d leave the page untyped—  
trusting the slips,  
the small silts of happening  
that pile up between words,  
more real than the words themselves.  
You hold the poem carefully,  
as if to see it would be to forget  
what you had come for—  
the way afternoons are always  
looking somewhere else.

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