Years of Indescretion
Whatever your eye alights on this morning is yours:
Dotted rhythms of colors as they fade to the color,
A grey agate, translucent and firm, with nothing
Beyond its putrifying reach. It's all there.
These are things offered to your participation.
These pebbles in a row are the seasons.
This is a house in which you may wish to live.
There are more than any of us to choose from
But each must live its own time.
And with the urging of the year each hastens onward separately
In strange sensations of emptiness, anguish, romantic
Outbursts, visions and wraiths. One meeting
Cancels another. "The seven-league boot
Gliding hither and tither of its own accord"
Salutes these forms for what they now are:
Fables that time invents
To explain its passing. They entertain
The very young and the very old, and not
One's standing up in them to shoulder
Task and vision, vision in the form of a task
So that the present seems like yesterday
And yesterday the place where we left off a little while ago.
John Ashbery, from
The Double Dream of Spring
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