And for those who understand:
Everything is not to be made new again.
I shall be inhabited in the old way.
It made no sense.
I should have listened more carefully
to the words under the wind
as it moved toward me.
The weather keeps me at my small tasks,
sorting out the news,
mending this and that
through the chain of lengthening days.
A hawk drifts by.
Hugely, spring exists again
under the smiling expanse of the sky,
and now it is time to wait again.
These pauses are supposed to be life.
Let's get on with it.
But what about the past?
The past slips through my fingers
in a dark dream of April,
the necklace of wishes alive and breathing
at your throat.
Why must it always end this way,
with a woman reading,
with the ruckus of her hair,
pulling me back into the silence
that night can't explain?
It drifts away in fragments,
and one is left sitting in the field
to try to write poetry,
some reason for having come so far,
so far alone, unasked.
The landscape sweeps out from me
to disappear on the horizon.
Yet the strewn evidence means something,
the small accidents and pleasures
of the day as it moves gracelessly on.
I am sitting in a place where sunlight
filters down, waiting for someone to come.
Will they notice me, this time as I am?
This is very near the end.
The sunset is starting to light up.
There are still other made-up countries
where we can hide forever,
wasted with eternal desire and sadness.
But I say it cannot come to any such end,
and yet it has ended, and the thing
I have fulfilled I have become.
The dog and I are here.
This is what matters for now.
Perhaps all that is wanted is time.
The breeze has dropped,
and silence has the last word.
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| A cento composed of lines from the poems of John Ashbery, arranged to be true. |
