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By Wendy Xu
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Audio Poem of the Day — Absolute Variations. Machine-transcribed; use the interactive transcript above to jump the player to any line.
0:00This is Wendy Shoe, reading my poem Absolute Variations. The first time I read a line by John Ashbury was in a little cafe in Massachusetts from left to right, there it was written across my friend's collarbone. It felt right to be there with someone who would show me something like that when we had never met before. In this country, it feels insane to accept our facts. To idly and without remorse on a Tuesday, remember the meadow if it's still there, trumpeting its tendrils. I wonder if that was a moral place, if the meadow has only relationship to other objects without intention, without obfuscation from belief, the clot of orange there along the innermost edge of vision are tulips. If I ever have the chance to get up close again, form is not all, there is, I wouldn't
1:04allow it, thought bubbles fogging up my screen. I remember my friend had a sort of ecstatic experience of pity there. He had recently lost his belief that he was doing the right thing, half frozen out of himself with worry, evergreen in friendship, we watched the dogs go round the loop, their tails like wheat, they ran and bobbed in time. Nobody, including myself, could feed my friend the correct answers, nor descend all the way there and back through reddish hell, just for him.
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