#ashbery

When the Sun Went Down John Ashbery To have been loved once by someone—surely There is a permanent good in that, Even if we don’t know all the circumstances Or it happened too long ago to make any difference. Like almost too much sunlight or an abundance of sweet-sticky, Caramelized things—who can tell you it’s wrong? Which of the others on your team could darken the passive Melody that runs on, that has been running since the world began? Yet, to be strapped to one’s mindset, which seems As enormous as a plain, to have to be told That its horizons are comically confining, And all the sorrow wells from there, like the slanting Plume of a waterspout: doesn’t it supplant knowledge Of the different forms of love, reducing them To a white indifferent prism, a roofless love standing open To the elements? And some see in this paradigm of how it rises Slowly to the indifferent heavens, all that pale glamour? The refrain is desultory as birdsong, it seeps unrecognizably Into the familiar structures that lead out from here To the still familiar peripheries and less sure notions: It already had its way. In time for evening relaxation. There are times when music steals a march on us, Is suddenly perplexingly nearer, flowing in my wrist; Is the true and dirty words you whisper nightly As the book closes like a collapsing sheet, a blur Of all kinds of connotations ripped from the hour and tossed Like jewels down a well; the answer, also, To the question that was on my mind but that I’ve forgotten, Except in the way certain things, certain nights, come together.