A Wave by John Ashbery Page B

didn’t quite admit feeling uneasy about, but now
    That it’s all out in the open, like a successful fire
    Burning in a fireplace, really there’s no cause for alarm.
    For even when hours and days go by in silence and the phone
    Never rings, and widely spaced drops of water
    Fall from the eaves, nothing is any longer a secret
    And one can live alone rejoicing in this:
    That the years of war are far off in the past or the future,
    That memory contains everything. And you see slipping down a hallway
    The past self you decided not to have anything to do with any more
    And it is a more comfortable you, dishonest perhaps,
    But alive. Wanting you to know what you’re losing.
    And still the machinery of the great exegesis is only beginning
    To groan and hum. There are moments like this one
    That are almost silent, so that bird-watchers like us
    Can come, and stay awhile, reflecting on shades of difference
    In past performances, and move on refreshed.
    But always and sometimes questioning the old modes
    And the new wondering, the poem, growing up through the floor,
    Standing tall in tubers, invading and smashing the ritual
    Parlor, demands to be met on its own terms now,
    Now that the preliminary negotiations are at last over.
    You could be lying on the floor,
    Or not have time for too much of any one thing,
    Yet you know the song quickens in the bones
    Of your neck, in your heel, and there is no point
    In looking out over the yard where tractors run,
    The empty space in the endless continuum
    Of time has come up: the space that can be filled only by you.
    And I had thought about the roadblocks, wondered
    Why they were less frequent, wondered what progress the blizzard
    Might have been making a certain distance back there,
    But it was not enough to save me from choosing
    Myself now, from being the place I have to get to
    Before nightfall and under the shelter of trees
    It is true but also without knowing out there in the dark,
    Being alone at the center of a moan that did not issue from me
    And is pulling me back toward old forms of address
    I know I have already lived through, but they are strong again,
    And big to fill the exotic spaces that arguing left.
    So all the slightly more than young
    Get moved up whether they like it or not, and only
    The very old or the very young have any say in the matter,
    Whether they are a train or a boat or just a road leading
    Across a plain, from nowhere to nowhere. Later on
    A record of the many voices of the middle-young will be issued
    And found to be surprisingly original. That can’t concern us,
    However, because now there isn’t space enough,
    Not enough dimension to guarantee any kind of encounter
    The stage-set it requires at the very least in order to burrow
    Profitably through history and come out having something to say,
    Even just one word with a slightly different intonation
    To cause it to stand out from the backing of neatly invented
    Chronicles of things men have said and done, like an English horn,
    And then to sigh, to faint back
    Into all our imaginings, dark
    And viewless as they are,
    Windows painted over with black paint but
    We can sufficiently imagine, so much is admitted, what
    Might be going on out there and even play some part
    In the ordering of it all into lengths of final night,
    Of dim play, of love that at last oozes through the seams
    In the cement, suppurates, subsumes
    All the other business of living and dying, the orderly
    Ceremonials and handling of estates,
    Checking what does not appear normal and drawing together
    All the rest into the report that will finally be made
    On a day when it does not appear that there is anything to receive it
    Properly and we wonder whether we too are gone,
    Buried in our love,
    The love that defined us only for a little while,
    And when it strolls back a few paces, to get another view,
    Fears that it may have encountered eternity in the meantime.
    And as the luckless describe love in glowing terms to strangers
    In taverns,