This is called "The Great Events I've Missed."
And it was called The Great Events.
And my friend read it and said Oh, this
is like an Ashbery poem.
You don't tell us what the great events are,
you only tell us the ones you've missed.
So I call it "The Great Events I've Missed."
Some of you might not know who Catherine Deneuve is,
the beautiful, now aging French film actress, very cold-looking
beauty.
She comes up.
And Jayne Mansfield is in here too.
She's the mother of-- does anybody
know who she's the mother of, was the mother of?
The Law and Order woman.
The woman on Law and Order.
That's right, thank you.
Mickey Hargitay's daughter, Mickey Hargitay, a muscle man.
"The Great Events I've Missed"--
the Northern Lights and more than once, a falling star.
In a yellow bikini, Jayne Mansfield, stepping off a yacht
with Frank Sinatra.
In the woods outside Avignon, two deer
nibbled wild strawberries behind the ruins of a Roman wall.
I was reading, I was taking a nap.
I was momentarily entranced by a different sector
of the universe.
At an indoor table among the lightly burnished sun
intellectuals at Café de Flore, I watched some men on ladders
pollarding the plane trees."
I don't know if you know what that is.
But these plane trees, they just chop
the hell out of the branches.
So look like ugly fat sticks, and then spring.
"I watched some men on ladders pollarding the plane trees.
So in spring, they'll be perceived
as that much more beautiful.
And almost missed her, Catherine Deneuve, aging alabaster.
She carried a shopping bag from Biondini's, not a lyre."
Lyre?
What's this called?
Lyre-- The old instrument.
"She carried a shopping bag from Biondini's, not a lyre.
But in my mind, she was the muse Erato.
I'd seen her in a stone sarcophagus at the Louvre.
She looked almost as beautiful and vulnerable and cold
as she had in Belle de Jour.
I watched the even less than fleeting glances
from the tables, returning to their books
in the French style of affected disinterest.
And what came to mind were the blank pages of diaries
and a house key and an unhappy wife has lost on purpose.
I remembered Euclid's concept of Pons Asinorum, The Bridge
of Asses, that point at which some learners failed
to grasp the difficult. Now I wonder if it wasn't actually
my girlfriend, but Erato in that night
meadow, sloping down from the notch in western Massachusetts.
Her hips rose and fell beneath me.
I thought those small high lonely sounds
were leading to her orgasm.
She wasn't gazing at my eyes, but at the northern lights."
That's long before Gail.