We’re leaving again of our own volition
for bogus-patterned plains, shreds of maps recurring
like waves on a beach, each unimaginable
and likely to go on being so.

But sometimes they get, you know, confused
and change their vows or the ground rules
that sustain all of us. It’s cheery, then, to reflect on the past
and what it brought us. To take stone books down

from the shelf. It is good, in fact,
to let the present pass without commentary
for what it says about the future.
There was nothing carnal in the way omens became portents.

Fact: all my appetites are friendly. I just
don’t want to live according to the next guy’s trespass,
meanwhile getting a few beefs off my chest,
if that’s OK. The wraparound flux we intuit

as time has other claims on our inventiveness.
A lot of retail figures in it. One’s daily horoscope
comes in eggshell, eggplant, and, just for the heck of it,
black. ’Nuf said. The deal is off. The rest is silence.

(John Ashbery)