and a prickly dust of unknown origin seems to rise upward from the seats.

-A line from the poem “The Last Romantic” by John Ashbery.

Ashbery at Hiroshima.

The American cynic in America’s act of self-justification.

The angel that ends the world

explaining himself over and over,

refusing to put down his trumpet,

always explaining the necessity of death

to a world that never questioned its own mortality.

No, says the angel, not death.

The necessity that I will kill you all because I insisted that I make this trumpet.

The angel is known to everyone, as the arrogant choice personified.

Ashbery is so depressed at Hiroshima!

Listen to his oxymoronic ironies!

His panoply of selections!

The schisms between his neurons and his electricity!

The atrocity of his id, the humane civility of this superego!

What a mouth, so closed and so selfsame, making declamations

of egoism and digressing in order to make nice.

What a cyanide capsule of the Cold War imagination!

His back tooth is broken daily!

The world went on to smartphones and he still smelled like microfiche.

As does, one foot on Ashbery’s corpse,

the other pushing down on the ringing in the ears of the Pacific Theater

(and time is no object)

the angel that ends the world

squats over his empire and complains about his hamstrings.