(no subject)
.....a little something for the new year.....
Tapestry
by John Ashbery
It is difficult to seperate the tapestry
from the room or loom which takes precedence over it.
For it must always be frontal yet to one side.
It insists on this picture of "history"
in the making, because there is no way out of the punishment
it proposes: sight blinded by sunlight.
The seeing taken in with what is seen
in an explosion of sudden awareness of its formal splendor.
The eyesight, seen as inner,
registers over the impact of itself
receiving phenomena, and in so doing
draws an outline, or a blueprint,
of what was just there: dead on the line.
If it has the form of a blanket, that is because
we are eager, all the same, to be wound in it:
This must be the good of not experiencing it.
But in some other life, which the blanket depicts anyway,
the citizens hold sweet commerce with one another
and pinch the fruit unpestered, as they will,
and words go crying after themselves, leaving the dream
upended in a puddle somewhere
as though "dead" were just another adjective.
..........................................................................................................
Sitting alone tonight in the still air of a driveway, I realised I could not make any sense of the departing year. Reflecting back, I thought at first that I could see all the aspects of 2005 aligned in my mind like a brilliant constellation, but looking closer, they became nothing more than smudges of soot at the edge of my vision. The earth’s rotation, you see, is a scientific exactitude when measured mathematically, but it is experienced on the ground as a foggy blur, and at its beginnings and endings, we look back and forth with incomprehension, wondering who the people were who lived our lives in between. That we can forget ourselves so easily is perhaps the greatest of scandals but we forget that fact too and then casually rejoin the party. And in so doing, our sullen pasts - so frail and fleeting - slip away from us for good.
At midnight, I watched the changing of the years with a genial detachment. There were embraces after the stroke, flushed exclamations, tiny admissions of feeling whispered from mouth to ear. And amid it all, I felt unexpectedly happy. The celebrations we share always seem for show but they are more subtle than we might credit; if you do not believe me, a warm kiss will confirm it. And though we know that there are teeth right below those lips - disappointments, betrayals, losses that will consume us - the sensation reminds us that it is all worth the risk, and so we stay together for another set of seasons. And presently, under fireworks, we set aside past pains and laugh and sing and touch glasses in a fragile show of optimism. Then we start our lives all over again, weighted with responsibility, alight with possibility, pirouetting between the two. Our days are the sum of this dance.
Tapestry
by John Ashbery
It is difficult to seperate the tapestry
from the room or loom which takes precedence over it.
For it must always be frontal yet to one side.
It insists on this picture of "history"
in the making, because there is no way out of the punishment
it proposes: sight blinded by sunlight.
The seeing taken in with what is seen
in an explosion of sudden awareness of its formal splendor.
The eyesight, seen as inner,
registers over the impact of itself
receiving phenomena, and in so doing
draws an outline, or a blueprint,
of what was just there: dead on the line.
If it has the form of a blanket, that is because
we are eager, all the same, to be wound in it:
This must be the good of not experiencing it.
But in some other life, which the blanket depicts anyway,
the citizens hold sweet commerce with one another
and pinch the fruit unpestered, as they will,
and words go crying after themselves, leaving the dream
upended in a puddle somewhere
as though "dead" were just another adjective.
..........................................................................................................
Sitting alone tonight in the still air of a driveway, I realised I could not make any sense of the departing year. Reflecting back, I thought at first that I could see all the aspects of 2005 aligned in my mind like a brilliant constellation, but looking closer, they became nothing more than smudges of soot at the edge of my vision. The earth’s rotation, you see, is a scientific exactitude when measured mathematically, but it is experienced on the ground as a foggy blur, and at its beginnings and endings, we look back and forth with incomprehension, wondering who the people were who lived our lives in between. That we can forget ourselves so easily is perhaps the greatest of scandals but we forget that fact too and then casually rejoin the party. And in so doing, our sullen pasts - so frail and fleeting - slip away from us for good.
At midnight, I watched the changing of the years with a genial detachment. There were embraces after the stroke, flushed exclamations, tiny admissions of feeling whispered from mouth to ear. And amid it all, I felt unexpectedly happy. The celebrations we share always seem for show but they are more subtle than we might credit; if you do not believe me, a warm kiss will confirm it. And though we know that there are teeth right below those lips - disappointments, betrayals, losses that will consume us - the sensation reminds us that it is all worth the risk, and so we stay together for another set of seasons. And presently, under fireworks, we set aside past pains and laugh and sing and touch glasses in a fragile show of optimism. Then we start our lives all over again, weighted with responsibility, alight with possibility, pirouetting between the two. Our days are the sum of this dance.