GIRLS ON THE RUN: A POEM By John Ashbery Farrar, Straus and Giroux $20, 55 pp.

Not since I was sick on marshmallows and watching Barbie commercials have I experienced something like this. But frankly, as I've never been involved in hub-cap theft and convex mirrors are thus completely alien to me, Girls on the Run is nonetheless exceptionally accessible--in Ashbery's (still-verdant) oeuvre.

A long poem with Edenic ambitions, Ashbery's latest work is based on a 19,000 page illustrated novel by the late recluse Henry Darger. By the time he died in 1972, Darger had produced an opus of lolli-comic girls, The Story of the Vivian Girls in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, in which Peggy and friends are chased about by storms and sundry tormenters. These girls reappear in Girls on the Run, running about with a most coherant inexplicability.

Indeed, the poem is really accessible only at the emotional, abstract levels. "Understanding" this work would require a conceit of the reader that, I think, has gone out of style in all but the most responsible circles. Each sentence, at least, for readers with stretchier imaginations, does manage to stand on its own--it is the sentence that follows which makes no sense. While each stanza begins with a hint a plot (at times reassuringly contained in quotation marks), its thread is soon lost in a stream of inside-joke-like surreality, such that one imagines the Vivians must be quite bright and also quite tight, in both senses of the word. And before long referents are slipping, definite articles are caught in the most inappropriate positions, and "It was just their pot luck. 'Oh well, Laure offered, we were going to close down that shaftway anyway, and the subway came close.'"

Darger's 19,000 pages would be a tempting companion to Girls on the Run, but neither HOLLIS nor Amazon seems to have heard of it, and his delicious piece on Ashbery's cover is credited to a gallery in Lausanne. Still, on its own pre-pubescent feet Girls on the Run is a wonder, combining dead-pan modernist language with the poignancy of a concrete burn on a Sunday afternoon. Reading the entire 55-page poem through is akin to sitting through a ten hour film, and Girls on the Run features an additional hypnotism in the person of its girls. Shuffles shuffles, Judy suggests and Tidbit agrees: plunky spunkiness speaks through childish seriousness as planes fly overhead and the storm breaks. We should congratulate Ashbery for such luxuriousness--Girls on the Run is heroically aesthetic. Perhaps tragic, perhaps symbolic, Ashbery's poem benefits from the sheer two-dimensionality that a surrealist text always lends to its texts, delighting the reader at the most critical level of appreciation.

In Girls on the Run, Ashbery exhibits an intellectual oddity that can be perceived as the sort of high-art-shy bravery that the really beloved fine arts girls can love so much. A succulent read, it makes little narrative sense--yet it is still somehow ten times as stimulating as the most scintillating and hyperbolic of television!