Volume 56, Number 3 · February 26, 2009
Structures in Sand
By John Ashbery
They still connect
(it still connects?)—
the feeling of the middle of the evening
as it is overtaken
by its sides.
And then everything must be taken up
and washed and put back together again.
Why is that so?
True happiness
(which we can't have, while we are close to believing
in it) ordains it, depends on life that ends.
Do you have enough
to refer the thing on this thing,
of many spirits
and cartoons?
There was just as much of the world then,
but it was distributed
less evenly.
Rome was closer than Canossa,
the old king dead,
dangling from mistletoe.
Breeze sends us back
to house.
Having been warned we strike
the new mission.
When are you returning?