Fourth Annual Blogger’s (Silent) Poetry Reading for the Feast of St. Brigid

More details over at ambermoggie’s blog and at branches up. (The poems I’ve posted in previous years: 2006, 2007, 2008.)

This poem by John Ashbery (1988) is the inscription on Siah Armajani’s Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge (Walker Sculpture Garden, Minneapolis).

And now I cannot remember how I would
have had it. It is not a conduit (confluence?) but a place.
The place, of movement and an order.
The place of old order.
But the tail end of the movement is new.
Driving us to say what we are thinking.
It is so much like a beach after all, where you stand
and think of going no further.
And it is good when you get to no further.
It is like a reason that picks you up and
places you where you always wanted to be.
This far, it is fair to be crossing, to have crossed.
Then there is no promise in the other.
Here it is. Steel and air, a mottled presence,
small panacea
and lucky for us.
And then it got very cool.

“That was nice, Mom.” -Chaos

21 thoughts on “Fourth Annual Blogger’s (Silent) Poetry Reading for the Feast of St. Brigid”

  1. Nice! This is my 4th year as well.. I was just too lazy to pull up my other posts. Apparently I was too busy looking up the weather forecasts of fat little rodents.

  2. really nice. I hadn’t seen this before. I wasn’t aware that you were a poetry person? cool. That’s something else we have in common, then.

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