For All the Birds in Poems: A Meditation on John Ashbery from the Woman in a Blue Hat

Don’t let the blue hat at the museum fool you. It’s a bird that occurs repeatedly, a bird that, in spite of disparagement, is on the horizon. It’s a bird in the third person that lands on the second person’s head, who has seven sons who were lost in the woods, who learned from owls how to see in the dark, who for the sake of continuity is a blue hat and a bird on exhibit. They are tutelary during America’s spiritual crises. The removal of birds is a symptom wearing a blue hat. Kinda like the bat trapped in my attic trying to get to its family trapped in my walls. This is how you withdraw from a world with light to the world of shadows and what it’s like to inherit madness. Or, this is how you avoid all the windows, mirrors, and the shadowy third person that suffers in every American household. She is bound to get ’er done. And this feeling of being propagated is not a good one. The soul of earth, crises, and horsehair plaster lead to ordinary jobs. Blue feathers and birds and hats and suffocation by asphyxiation. While the speaker is concerned with the story of suffering, I’m over here breathing, standing still memorizing all the blue hats that fly south to save little yellow horses from choking to death on an American poetry that’s been, for centuries, in a long line of inescapable tradition, and always out to pasture feeding on artificial yellow number 5, approved by the FDA in 1969. This yellow has a boiling point of 1,598 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s how we got here to begin with, talking about birds dropping out of earth and all the blue hats made of feathers. Remove the sky, subtract blue, and take away the feathers. Without history emptying out of our bodies, we are left with terms unable to describe the situation. Having meaning is wearing a blue hat with feathers. The bird and the word for bird have no sky if they don’t succeed one another. This is the year of the double bloom in the sky, when some of your moons sink below the horizon and some don’t. 0.1 degrees of separation between Jupiter and Saturn and a self-reliant woman in a blue hat and the lettuce in my backyard—talk about high modernism in a time like this. It’s recipe for disaster. In my previous life I didn’t have a head, before I was blue hat I was a bird, before I was a bird I was a woman, but now I am a bird again and I am nibbling on humans left behind in the orchard. I’ve been dying to sleep the sleep of apples ever since I flew out of the nest and landed on your shoulder. Can you hear me now?

Read more from Issue 20.1.