Crossroads in the Past by John Ashbery

<p>Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman</p><p> </p><p>Crossroads in the Past</p><p>BY JOHN ASHBERY</p><p>That night the wind stirred in the forsythia bushes,</p><p>but it was a wrong one, blowing in the wrong direction.</p><p>“That’s silly. How can there be a wrong direction?</p><p>‘It bloweth where it listeth,’ as you know, just as we do</p><p>when we make love or do something else there are no rules for.”</p><p> </p><p>I tell you, something went wrong there a while back.</p><p>Just don’t ask me what it was. Pretend I’ve dropped the subject.</p><p>No, now you’ve got me interested, I want to know</p><p>exactly what seems wrong to you, how something could</p><p> </p><p>seem wrong to you. In what way do things get to be wrong?</p><p>I’m sitting here dialing my cellphone</p><p>with one hand, digging at some obscure pebbles with my shovel</p><p>with the other. And then something like braids will stand out,</p><p> </p><p>on horsehair cushions. That armchair is really too lugubrious.</p><p>We’ve got to change all the furniture, fumigate the house,</p><p>talk our relationship back to its beginnings. Say, you know</p><p>that’s probably what’s wrong—the beginnings concept, I mean.</p><p>I aver there are no beginnings, though there were perhaps some</p><p>sometime. We’d stopped, to look at the poster the movie theater</p><p> </p><p>had placed freestanding on the sidewalk. The lobby cards</p><p>drew us in. It was afternoon, we found ourselves</p><p>sitting at the end of a row in the balcony; the theater was unexpectedly</p><p>crowded. That was the day we first realized we didn’t fully</p><p>know our names, yours or mine, and we left quietly</p><p>amid the gray snow falling. Twilight had already set in.</p>