Once, out on the water in the clear, early nineteenth-century twilight, <br />you asked time to suspend its flight. If wishes could beget more than sobs, <br />that would be my wish for you, my darling, my angel. But other <br />principles prevail in this glum haven, don't they? If that's what it is. <br /> <br />Then the wind fell of its own accord. <br />We went out and saw that it had actually happened. <br />The season stood motionless, alert. How still the dropp was <br />on the burr I know not. I come all <br />packaged and serene, yet I keep losing things. <br /> <br />I wonder about Australia. Is it anything about Canada? <br />Do pigeons flutter? Is there a strangeness there, to complete <br />the one in me? Or must I relearn my filing system? <br />Can we trust others to indict us <br />who see us only in the evening rush hour, <br />and never stop to think? O, I was so bright about you, <br />my songbird, once. Now, cattails immolated <br />in the frozen swamp are about all I have time for. <br />The days are so polarized. Yet time itself is off center. <br />At least that's how it feels to me. <br /> <br />I know it as well as the streets in the map of my imagined <br />industrial city. But it has its own way of slipping past. <br />There was never any fullness that was going to be; <br />you waited in line for things, and the stained light was <br />impenitent. 'Spiky' was one adjective that came to mind, <br /> <br />yet for all its raised or lower levels I approach this canal. <br />Its time was right in winter. There was pipe smoke <br />in cafés, and outside the great ashen bird <br />streamed from lettered display windows, and waited <br />a little way off. Another chance. It never became a gesture.<br /><br />John Ashbery<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/poem-at-the-new-year/
