John Ashbery: “The Skaters”

The American

Theme and Variations

	A man was going home to wash his feet
	And in the doorway he thought about his toes.

	A
	The man marched home to wash his feet.
	In the stone doorway he paused, remembering the toes.

	The obelisk seized the air with its point.
	And at its base stood an clever undressed man
	Gushed over by the waters of the base.
	The point is a mistake. But in the homely waters grew refractions.
	Impressions Reflections

	The shoes marched over stone pavement
	At home the acres of hot water were waiting.    leave in?

	The stone shore marched over itself
	The hot pavement mud of the cleansing shore
	In which it grew one tower
	To unlike itself in the disturbed distances
	The lye places a mud hand around
	Sand-blossom too pale to be a flower
	In the real dirt of a country yet dying of it--
	A country beside the sand.

	The strangled sea urchin gasped beside the
	Mud plant tide. Nine o'clock.
	And the hot mud they threw from the tower
	Caused

	The plants grew. In their area they waited
	Not growing, just being
	What they had been. In this way
	Orchids devour men and are less,      in
	Their behavior less. All that matters is getting away from it.

	It is time to pass from theory to effect.
	In matters of hygiene the demand is XKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXKXK
	Important XKXKXKXKXK In serious cases of hygiene
	Such as the eskimos, the helplessness is important
	To be lived      are
	Man and his feet the-unembarrassed yearning
	For better apology of the giant flowers,
	Weeps, on the bank of the river
	Carrying the dirt away,. Tto the west
	The somber wooded line plunges
	Under the nap of mud. Only rarely
	Rocks point in the plains. Thick tower
	Cold decomposed soil
	Confined little by little to the valleys  invisibly
	Beyond the somber territory slopes insibly toward the sea
	The eye will no longer have to stop
	At but a few sand[???]XXX mountains
	In the low spreading plains