John Ashbery
FARM II
I was thinking
Now that the flowers are
forgotten
A whole new frontier
Backing around the old one are
Swamping its former good ideas
Ploughing under the errors too
In its tin maelstrom: the overloaded
Ferryboat slowly moves away from the dock
Are these dog-eared things
Weeds what you call them
These things sitting like mail to be read
Toward the end of afternoon
Things the mailman brought
I would like to enroll
In the new course
At the study center
A lattice-work crust
Holes are blobs of darkness
Has been placed across the road
You can't walk our too far that way any more
They say the children are demolishing
The insides of the woods
burnt orange
That it 's spectacular
Bur it doesn't
Take us our into the open sea
Only
to
the middle of a river
Fumbling which way
to
go.
