Life—It’s Marvelous—He Composed

But what’s that life follows and falls

Behind at the end of the John

Ashbery lyric, Light Turnouts?

There seems to be an us—a ghost

Apostrophized and its speaker-

Interlocutor. There’s a lot

Of the usual Ashbery

Sleight of hand—ordinary lines

Of slightly nonstandard syntax

That add up to a prose house heap

Of something that almost makes sense

In a conventional manner,

Which is exactly what it does

Not do. The ghost and the speaker

Are involved in their adventure

Of another order, although

The reader is shown none of it,

Aside from a stray simile

Or two, like seizing the weather,

Like a shot in the dark.

Maybe life follows those. Also,

You discover you want to know.

For whatever reason, you want

To know what life is following.