A Wave by John Ashbery Page A

standing on one leg while emerging continually
    Into an inexpressive void, the blighted fields
    Of a kiss, the rope of a random, unfortunate
    Observation still around our necks though we thought we
    Had cast it off in a novel that has somehow gotten stuck
    To our lives, battening on us. A sad condition
    To see us in, yet anybody
    Will realize that he or she has made those same mistakes,
    Memorized those same lists in the due course of the process
    Being served on you now. Acres of bushes, treetops;
    Orchards where the quince and apple seem to come and go
    Mysteriously over long periods of time; waterfalls
    And what they conceal, including what comes after—roads and roadways
    Paved for the gently probing, transient automobile;
    Farragoes of flowers; everything, in short,
    That makes this explicit earth what it appears to be in our
    Glassiest moments when a canoe shoots out from under some foliage
    Into the river and finds it calm, not all that exciting but above all
    Nothing to be afraid of, celebrates us
    And what we have made of it.
    Not something so very strange, but then seeming ordinary
    Is strange too. Only the way we feel about the everything
    And not the feeling itself is strange, strange to us, who live
    And want to go on living under the same myopic stars we have known
    Since childhood, when, looking out a window, we saw them
    And immediately liked them.
    And we can get back to that raw state
    Of feeling, so long deemed
    Inconsequential and therefore appropriate to our later musings
    About religion, about migrations. What is restored
    Becomes stronger than the loss as it is remembered;
    Is a new, separate life of its own. A new color. Seriously blue.
    Unquestioning. Acidly sweet. Must we then pick up the pieces
    (But what are the pieces, if not separate puzzles themselves,
    And meanwhile rain abrades the window?) and move to a central clearinghouse
    Somewhere in Iowa, far from the distant bells and thunderclaps that
    Make this environment pliant and distinct? Nobody
    Asked me to stay here, at least if they did I forgot, but I can
    Hear the dust at the pores of the wood, and know then
    The possibility of something more liberated and gracious
    Though not of this time. Failing
    That there are the books we haven’t read, and just beyond them
    A landscape stippled by frequent glacial interventions
    That holds so well to its lunette one wants to keep it but we must
    Go on despising it until that day when environment
    Finally reads as a necessary but still vindictive opposition
    To all caring, all explaining. Your finger traces a
    Bleeding violet line down the columns of an old directory and to this spongy
    State of talking things out a glass exclamation point opposes
    A discrete claim: forewarned. So the voluminous past
    Accepts, recycles our claims to present consideration
    And the urban landscape is once again untroubled, smooth
    As wax. As soon as the oddity is flushed out
    It becomes monumental and anxious once again, looking
    Down on our lives as from a baroque pinnacle and not the
    Mosquito that was here twenty minutes ago.
    The past absconds
    With our fortunes just as we were rounding a major
    Bend in the swollen river; not to see ahead
    Becomes the only predicament when what
    Might be sunken there is mentioned only
    In crabbed allusions but will be back tomorrow.
    It takes only a minute revision, and see—the thing
    Is there in all its interested variegatedness,
    With prospects and walks curling away, never to be followed,
    A civilized concern, a never being alone.
    Later on you’ll have doubts about how it
    Actually was, and certain greetings will remain totally forgotten,
    As water forgets a dam once it’s over it. But at this moment
    A spirit of independence reigns. Quietude
    To get out and do things in, and a rush back to the house
    When evening turns up, and not a moment too soon.
    Headhunters and jackals mingle with the viburnum
    And hollyhocks outside, and it all adds up, pointedly,
    To something one