Reading Ashbery in Eau Claire The roof booms. He’s perfect  for this small apartment, wallaby amok  in the crawlspace, white asparagus  flaccid at last, indifferent snow, port in a cracked glass.  Quadruplets, these residences: shared walls, one bold  V inverted, draped on the lot of us, white  with worry. Where’s the avalanche? The cannon?  Where I come from, dogs run in the streets: snow, no snow.  Or it’s black. Geese eclipse a peripheral star, honk  like Renaults. Sound has an edge. We cut  Christmas men out of skyline. Maybe it’s the West, too much  of a good thing, the rest trimmed with a sharp knife. Here  chains on macadam, the guy two over hanging  the portrait of an ingénue, pounding in one ten-penny  after another. Or not. I’ve had enough  of ambiguity: the line of shrouded trees,  the llama on the crooked road,  the failing gray.