"...in the present we are always escaping from and falling back into, ... the waterwheel of days..."

Mere forgetfulness cannot remove it
Nor wishing bring it back, as long as it remains
The white precipitate of its dream
In the climate of sighs flung across our world,
A cloth over a birdcage. But it is certain that
What is beautiful seems so only in relation to a specific
Life, experienced or not, channeled into some form
Steeped in the nostalgia of a collective past.

"Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," John Ashbery

via: tumblr

breeze

"A breeze like the turning of a page..."


from: Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror John Ashbery

via: danske

“Perhaps an angel looks like everything
We have forgotten, I mean forgotten
Things that don't seem familiar when
We meet again, lost beyond all telling
Which were ours once."

from "Self-Portrait in A Convex Mirror"
John Ashbery
:photo via diana:muse

"What Is Poetry"

The medieval town, with frieze
Of boy scouts from Nagoya? The snow

That came when we wanted it to snow?
Beautiful images? Trying to avoid

Ideas, as in this poem? But we
Go back to them as to a wife, leaving

The mistress we desire? Now they
Will have to believe it

As we believed it. In school
All the thought got combed out:

What was left was like a field.
Shut your eyes, and you can feel it for miles around.

Now open them on a thin vertical path.
It might give us--what?--some flowers soon?

John Ashbery