Ashbery is usually obscure, and this must be one of his more straightforward pieces in terms of narrative and syntax. A speaker is writing an instruction manual on the uses of a new metal, and lets their mind wander to Guadalajara. This is the appropriative act that Michel de Certau, in the Practice of Everyday Life, called “La Perruque” — doing creative work surreptitiously while on the company payroll.

I now realise that, like the Greenbaum story, this ends on a question I often repeat to myself: What more is there to do, except stay? And that we cannot do.

Published in Some Trees, Ecco Press, 1978. Also available to read on the Poetry Foundation website, here