"The Big Cloud," an exceptionally beautiful lyric that's also from 1987's April Galleons, seems at first to be "about" something. "For ages man has labored to put his dreams in order. Look at the result. / Once an idea like the correct time has been elucidated / It must fade or spread..." Yes, that feels true, philosophically at least. But as the poem delves deeper into the idea, abstractions pile up - "Last words are uttered, and first love / Ascends to its truly majestic position unimpaired." And then, in the final stanza, concrete images elucidate particular lives - "Letters were strewn across the floor, / Singing the joyful song of how no one was ever going to read them." As happens repeatedly in Ashbery's work, objects and ideas take on flesh and personality. The poem ends elegaically:

It was existence again in all its tautness,
Playing its adolescent joke, its pictures
Teasing our notion of fragility with their monumental permanence.
But life was never the same again. Something faltered,
Something went away.

That's about as sentimental as Ashbery gets. Contrast the above with the opening of the title poem, from 1992: "A yak is a prehistoric cabbage: of that, at least, we may be sure." This immediately undercuts any sense of groundedness we may have brought to our reading of the poem. "Still Life with Stranger," from the same volume, ends: "The whole cast of characters is imaginary / now, but up ahead, in shadow, the past waits." This boldly states what is usually unsaid: that these words are not meant as a direct reflection of any reality. A later poem, "The Green Mummies," begins with another perfect example: "Avuncular and teeming, the kind luggage / hosed down the original site."

Always playing, Ashbery writes inexplicable sentences in utterly graceful English. We extract meaning from them a little like we abstract it from music or sculpture. He presents facts and interpretations in tones of great seriousness, but with the subjects drained out. And somehow he makes this weird narrative flow work over the long haul, even through some very lengthy poems. The title poem of 1994's And the Stars Were Shining is like a short story or a movie set in an alien yet familiar universe. The narrator leaps through hoops of images, then pauses to reflect on the creative spirit:

...Some people have an idea a day,
others millions, still others are condemned
to spend their life inside an idea, like a
bubble chamber.

And in the final section comes close to stating a philosophy of art: "It's as though we've come refreshed / from another planet, and spied immediately what was lacking in this one: / an orange, fresh linens, ink, a pen." "The Problem of Anxiety," from 1995's Can You Hear, Bird, asks, "Suppose this poem were about you--would you / put in the things I've carefully left out: / descriptions of pain, and sex, and how shiftily / people behave toward each other?"