The tests are good. You need a million of them.
You’d die laughing as I write to you
Through leaves and articulations, yes, laughing
Myself silly too. The funniest little thing . . .

That’s how it all began. Looking back on it,
I wonder now if it could have been on some day
Findable in an old calendar? But no,
It wasn’t out of history, but inside it.
That’s the thing. One whatever day we came
To a small house built just above the water,
You had to step over to see inside the attic window.
Someone had judged the height to be just right
The way the light came in, and they are
Giving that party, to turn on that dishwasher
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.

(John Ashbery, from Houseboat Days.)