Houseboat Days

Saying It To Keep It From Happening

Some departure from the norm

Will occur as time grows more open about it.

The consensus gradually changed; nobody

Lies about it any more. Rust dark pouring

Over the body, changing it without decay—

People with too many things on their minds, but we live

In the interstices, between a vacant stare and the ceiling,

Our lives remind us. Finally this is consciousness

And the other livers of it get off at the same stop.

How careless. Yet in the end each of us

Is seen to have traveled the same distance—it’s time

That counts, and how deeply you have invested in it,

Crossing the street of an event, as though coming out of it 

were

The same as making it happen. You’re not sorry,

Of course, especially if this was the way it had to happen,

Yet would like an exacter share, something about time

That only a clock can tell you: how it feels, not what it

means.

It is a long field, and we know only the far end of it,

Not the part we presumably had to go through to get there.

If it isn’t enough, take the idea

Inherent in the day, armloads of wheat and flowers

Lying around flat on handtrucks, if maybe it means more

In pertaining to you, yet what is is what happens in the end

As though you cared. The event combined with

Beams leading up to it for the look of force adapted to the 

wiser

Usages of age, but it’s both there

And not there, like washing or sawdust in the sunlight,

At the back of the mind, where we live now.” 


John Ashbery