John Ashbery

Light Turnouts

time memory free verse reflective haunting

Light Turnouts - meaning Summary

Companionship Amid Everyday Dislocation

Light Turnouts addresses the uneasy companionship between presence and absence in everyday life. The speaker talks to a ghost in a crowded noonday, treating memory and small shared phrases as shelters and safe houses. Moments of reading, speaking a familiar line, or one person advancing while another lingers become tentative ways of holding meaning. The poem suggests that minor interactions and remembered adventures briefly organize disjointed experience into something like continuity.

Read Complete Analyses

Dear ghost, what shelter in the noonday crowd? I’m going to write an hour, then read what someone else has written. You’ve no mansion for this to happen in. But your adventures are like safe houses, your knowing where to stop an adventure of another order, like seizing the weather. We too are embroiled in this scene of happening, And when we speak the same phrase together: “We used to have one of those,” it matters like a shot in the dark. One of us stays behind. One of us advances on the bridge as on a carpet. Life—it’s marvelous— fellows and falls behind.

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