A Boy

By John Ashbery

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.