"The Improvement" by John Ashbery

[dailybitsofwisdom]

Is that where it happens?
Only yesterday when I came back, I had this
diaphanous disaffection for this room, for spaces,
for the whole sky and whatever lies beyond.
I felt the eggplant, then the rhubarb.
Nothing seems strong enough for
this life to manage, that sees beyond
into particles forming some kind of entity -
so we get dressed kindly, crazy at the moment.
A life of afterwords begins.

We never live long enough in our lives
to know what today is like.
Shards, smiling beaches,
abandon us somehow even as we converse with them.
And the leopard is transparent, like iced tea.

I wake up, my face pressed
in the dewy mess of a dream. It mattered,
because of the dream, and because dreams are by nature sad
even when there’s a lot of exclaiming and beating
as there was in this one. I want the openness
of the dream turned inside out, exploded
into pieces of meaning by its own unasked questions,
beyond the calculations of heaven. Then the larkspur
would don its own disproportionate weight,
and trees return to the starting gate.
See, our lips bend.

JOHN ASHBERY
United States • B. 1927

Often accused of breaking the rules of Surrealism, John Ashbery has won nearly every major poetry award including the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Raised in Rochester, New York, Ashbery spent his youth studying the works of poets W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas. He later received an A.B., graduating cum laude from Harvard, and spent many years working as copyrighter and art critic before beginning his teaching career at Brooklyn University in the 1970s. His style is very free-flowing and based on topics of the human mind that were difficult for critics to analyze. He is quoted as saying his goal in poetry was "to produce a poem that the critic cannot even talk about."