Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm David Kern, and today is Thursday, July 27,

2023. Today's poem is by an American poet named John Ashbury. He lived from 1927 to 2017. And Oxford

University literary critic John Bailey wrote that, that quote ashbury sounded in poetry the

standard tones of the age and langdon hammer said quote no figure looms so large in american

poetry over the past 50 years as john ashbury and no american poet has had a larger, more diverse vocabulary,

not Whitman, not pound. End quote. Ashbury won a MacArthur Fellowship. He won the Pulitzer

Prize for Poetry, the National Book Award for Poetry, a National Book Critics Circle Award,

and a Guggenheim Fellowship. So needless to say, he is one of the most important poets of the 20th century.

And the poem that I'm going to read today, I'm going to read because tomorrow the 28th is Ashbury's

birthday. And I thought I'd share one of his poems. It's one of his later poems. It was written in 2000.

It's called Crossroads in the Past, and it is from a collection

called It Your Name Here. It does have one line in it that if you're listening with your kids,

you may want to listen first and then decide whether you want to include your kids in it.

It's not gratuitous or anything, but it does allude to, well, you'll see.

So here it is, Crossroads in the Past by John Ashbury. Read it once, a few comments, read it again,

and that will be today's episode. Crossroads in the past.

That night, the wind stirred in the Forsythia bushes,

but it was a wrong one, blowing in the wrong direction.

That's silly. How can there be a wrong direction?

It'd blow it where it listeth, as you know,

just as we do when we make love or do something else there

and no rules for.

...