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Christopher Tignor & John Ashbery - A Boy

from Thunder Lay Down In The Heart by Christopher Tignor

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about

featuring John Ashbery

lyrics

A Boy

I’ll do what the raids suggest,
Dad, and that other livid window,
But the tide pushes an awful lot of monsters
And I think it’s my true fate.

It had been raining but
It had not been raining.

No one could begin to mop up this particular mess.
Thunder lay down in the heart.
“My child, I love any vast electrical disturbance.”
Disturbance! Could the old man, face in the rainweed,

Ask more smuttily? By night it charged over plains,
Driven from Dallas and Oregon, always whither,
Why not now? The boy seemed to have fallen
From shelf to shelf of someone’s rage.

That night it rained on the boxcars, explaining
The thought of the pensive cabbage roses near the boxcars.
My boy. Isn’t there something I asked you once?
What happened? It’s also farther to the corner
Aboard the maple furniture. He
Couldn’t lie. He’d tell ‘em by their syntax.

But listen now in the flood.
They’re throwing up behind the lines.
Dry fields of lightning rise to receive
The observer, the mincing flag. An unendurable age.

-- John Ashbery, from Some Trees (1956)

"A Boy," from Some Trees. Copyright (c) 1956, 1985, 1997, 2008 by John Ashbery. All rights reserved. Used by arrangement with Georges Borchardt, Inc. for the author.

credits

from Thunder Lay Down In The Heart, released March 18, 2014
poem and reading, John Ashbery
music and violins, Christopher Tignor
cello, Michael Unterman

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Christopher Tignor New York

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