past simple 14




			Ken Bolton

			POEM (ASCENSION)
			POEM (ASCENSION)
			a stick moves across the ground, leaves circle & rise the great ominous sounds of Ascension as it begins & I am merely ‘up again’, at night, reading — bits of this & that, looking some things ‘up’, making a list. “I spend my days in picture galleries solely, & that’s why I’m so melancholy.” I am not melancholy. The theme for The Honeymooners & for The Jackie Gleason Show come next & I have an image of Jack Rose standing importantly & conducting those few bars on television black & white his suit maybe a little large for him aspirational this was the nation viewing I wonder did Frank O'Hara care for Gleason maybe unlikely I did. As a teenager I knew it was a world passed already, knowable history saying goodbye Jackie’s face wobbling slightly as it went under, slipped slowly away, full of knowledge that was then not now. It is a long while since I have watched a movie—black & white—with their earnest propositions what was “the pony of war”? who to ask? Will we ever know? I see Crab tomorrow night, but I won’t ask I am really an Indian at heart—beneath “a hazardous settlement” & these the wings of an extraordinary liberty which I know & know only now, not forever—as I rise. Not tough like Frank. With none of the warmth of John Coltrane. But alive. # a stick moves across the ground, leaves circle & rise the great ominous sounds of Ascension as it begins possibility invests the stacked, piled, fallen books and CD covers on the desk, the quiet, blank computer screen. I pick a slender mittel european novel read rats run in the roof — or maybe possums (not much cleaner worse when they die) — birds I can hear still, the extending summer night. I rise free, move thru the darkened house — with me, Coltrane, O’Hara, Pam Brown # a stick moves across the ground, leaves circle & rise cloud builds, roiling — stills, like a move in chess the implications, now, contemplated The light branches, of the hedge, outside my window scrape fitful across the glass—stop, start. A sound like worry an importuning the great ominous sounds of Ascension as it begins But you are ‘other’ move thru the house The fridge’s hum’s concluding Of ‘no moment’ — but yours, & actual — the skin’s slight moisture cooling in the night air Beyond, vine leaves, street light filtered thru jacaranda # a stick moves across the ground, leaves circle & rise & I am merely ‘up again’, at night, reading— the music’s themes repeat themselves return— like characters in Solaris, worrying, plaintive their suffering ennobling — read this, answer that. The Rauschenberg I look at—‘Pilgrim’— beside the fridge magnet (Given by John—bought in Prague, gravity the O’Hara must counter) Days ago I wondered would O’Hara have liked the music I was playing & figured no. ‘Sidewinder’, ‘Speedball’—too heartless. ‘Star Eyes’, on the other hand, would be okay. With him. With me. (Am I—really—an Indian? O’Hara at least could ride a horse sit one.) A letter on my desk from John requiring an answer. To its left the dark & focused stare of the handsome young man who is Kafka (John’s memento) near a small, too-blue reproduction, of Rauschenberg—‘Pilgrim’, 1960— & books, by O’Hara, Maurice Scully, Lee Harwood, Saskia Beukel Tony Towle, Adorno, Chris Nealon, Tabucchi, Pam’s new one, Cath’s & mine—& tapes, mostly ‘live’, of Speedboat. the motifs repeat—the great ominous sounds —of plaint, or suffering?—a kind of hand-wringing— like the movement in the wind, of the hedge outside, saying What is to be done? What is to be done? a stick moves across the ground, leaves circle & rise the great ominous sounds as I read.
			pastsimple