John Ashbery

The evening light was like honey in the trees When you left me and walked to the end of the street Where the sunset abruptly ended. The wedding-cake drawbridge lowered itself To the fragile forget-me-not flower. You climbed aboard. Burnt horizons suddenly paved with golden stones, Dreams I had, including suicide, Puff out the hot-air balloon now. It is bursting, it is about to burst

But always and sometimes questioning the old modes_x000D_ _x000D_ And the new wondering, the poem, growing up through the floor,_x000D_ _x000D_ Standing tall in tubers, invading and smashing the ritual_x000D_ _x000D_ Parlor, demands to be met on its own terms now,_x000D_ _x000D_ Now that the preliminary negotiations are at last over.

Then let yourself love all that you take delight in_x000D_ _x000D_ Accept yourself whole, accept the heritage_x000D_ _x000D_ That shaped you and is passed on from age to age_x000D_ _x000D_ Down to your entity. Remain mysterious;_x000D_ _x000D_ Rather than be pure, accept yourself as numerous.

until only infinity remained of beauty

The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be.

The sun fades like the spreading_x000D_ _x000D_ Of a peacock's tail, as though twilight_x000D_ _x000D_ Might be read as a warning to those desperate_x000D_ _x000D_ For easy solutions.

Life is beautiful. He who reads that_x000D_ _x000D_ As in the window of some distant, speeding train_x000D_ _x000D_ Knows what he wants, and what will befall.

Life is not at all what you might think it to be_x000D_ _x000D_ A simple tale where each thing has its history_x000D_ _x000D_ It's much more than its scuffle and anything goes_x000D_ _x000D_ Both evil and good, subject to the same laws.

Its a bit mad. Too bad, I mean, that getting to know each just for a fleeting second Must be replaced by unperfect knowledge of the featureless whole Like some pocket history of the world, so general As to constitute a sob or wail

The summer demands and takes away too much. /But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes