Wait - it has some kind of finish on it.
No point in overreacting, since the effect
is, in effect, not overdone. There are scars
and stars, things to be met with in life, a lifetime
of slow defeat spent sitting outdoors, propped
against a wall, eating day-old bread. And then
the world changed.
No
one expected it would be like this.
Yet we are calmer, and safer, for it,
as though some big man had come in, and turned
and abruptly left in the few moments i was out.
Those are people in the street, the ones you
passed. Who can say if it's empty or clear? That
Patina got on it, and was what mattered for a while.
In groves in England
you think there must be some
superior kind of stretching, some way to go
that is not moving off at all. Some ministering
to the handy and the articulate, and bread left then
won't be idle, part of a mass of frayed circumstance.
Water would rise coolly toward the throat then.
Pray that in just one
bubble the color
will cover the whole surface sheen,
polluting remembrance, the house where i was born.
And in that moment of curious rage an attic
is pitched, a place to come after long love,
and dexterity after wearing these fingers out.
John Ashbery