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The ellipse is as aimless as that, Stretching invisibly into the future so as to reappear In our present. Its flexing is its account, Return to the point of no return.

John Ashbery

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John Ashbery
Age: 90 †
Born: 1927
Born: July 28
Died: 2017
Died: September 3
Journalist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Rochester
New York
G'on Ashberi
John Ashberry
Jonas Barry
Jon Asshuberī
John Lawrence Ashbery
John Ashbery
Account
Accounts
Return
Present
Invisibly
Point
Reappear
Future
Flexing
Life
Aimless
Stretching

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And just as there are no words for the surface, that is, No words to say what it really is, that it is not Superficial but a visible core, then there is No way out of the problem of pathos vs. experience.
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It is written in the Book of Usable Minutes That all things have their center in their dying.
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Its a bit mad. Too bad, I mean, that getting to know each just for a fleeting second Must be replaced by unperfect knowledge of the featureless whole Like some pocket history of the world, so general As to constitute a sob or wail
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Until, accustomed to disappointments, you can let yourself rule and be ruled by these strings or emanations that connect everything together, you haven't fully exorcised the demon of doubt that sets you in motion like a rocking horse that cannot stop rocking.
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Not until it starts to stink does the inevitable happen.
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There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.
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A perfect example of the new republic's urge to drape itself with the togas of classical respectability.
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To the poet as a basement quilt, but perhaps To some reader a latticework of regrets.
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Once a happy old man One can never change the core of things, and light burns you the harder for it.
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Silly girls your heads full of boys
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And the way Though discontinuous, and intermittent, sometimes Not heard of for years at a time, did, Nonetheless, move up, although, to his surprise It was inside the house, And always getting narrower.
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In the increasingly convincing darkness The words become palpable, like a fruit That is too beautiful to eat.
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Extreme patience and persistence are required, Yet everybody succeeds at this before being handed The surprise box lunch of the rest of his life.
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Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you, At incredible speed, traveling day and night.
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I'm heading for a clean-named place like Wisconsin, and mad as a jack-o'-lantern, will get there without help and nosy proclivities.
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Just keep playing, mastering as you do the step Into disorder this one meant. Don't you see It's all we can do? Meanwhile, great fires Arise, as of haystacks aflame. The dial has been set And that's ominous, but all your graciousness in living Conspires with it, now that this is our home: A place to be from, and have people ask about.
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... the first step of the terrible journey toward feeling somebody should act, that ends in utter confusion and hopelessness, east of the sun and west of the moon.
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Part of the strength of Pollock and Rothko's art, in fact, is this doubt as to whether art may be there at all.
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And we may be led, then, upward through more Powerful forms of poetry, past columns With peeling posters on them, to the country of indifference. Meanwhile if the swell diapasons, blooms Unhappily and too soon, the little people are nonetheless real.
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All beauty, resonance, integrity, Exist by deprivation or logic Of strange position.
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