Ashbery

We Hesitate


The days to come are a watershed.
You have to improve your portrait of God
To make it plain.  It is on the list,
You and your bodies are on the line.

The new past now unfurls like a great somber hope
Above the treeline, like a giant's hand
Placed tentatively on the hurrying clouds.
The basins come to be full and complex

But it is not enough.  Concern and embarrassment
Grow rank.  Once they have come home there is no cursing.
Fires disturb the evening.  No one can hear the story.
Or sometimes people just forget
Like a child.  It took me months
To get that discipline banned, and what is the use,
To ban that?  You remain a sane, yet sophisticated person:
Rooted in twilight, dreaming, a piece of traffic.



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