John Ashbery - As One Put Drunk Into the Packet-Boat lyrics

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John Ashbery - As One Put Drunk Into the Packet-Boat lyrics

As One Put Drunk Into the Packet-Boat I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free. Elsewhere we are as sitting in a place where sunlight Filters down, a little at a time, Waiting for someone to come. Harsh words are spoken, As the Sun yellows the green of the maple tree.... So this was all, but obscurely I felt the stirrings of new breath in the pages Which all winter long had smelled like an old catalogue. New sentences were starting up. But the summer Was well along, not yet past the mid-point But full and dark with the promise of that fullness, That time when one can no longer wander away And even the least attentive fall silent To watch the thing that is prepared to happen. A look of gla** stops you And you walk on shaken: was I the perceived? Did they notice me, this time, as I am, Or is it postponed again? The children Still at their games, clouds that arise with a swift Impatience in the afternoon sky, then dissipate As limpid, dense twilight comes. Only in that tooting of a horn Down there, for a moment, I thought The great, formal affair was beginning, orchestrated, Its colors concentrated in a glance, a ballade That takes in the whole world, now, but lightly, Still lightly, but with wide authority and tact. The prevalence of those gray flakes failing? They are sun motes. You have slept in the Sun Longer than the sphinx, and are none the wiser for it. Come in. And I thought a shadow fell across the door But it was only her come to ask once more If I was coming in, and not to hurry in case I wasn't. The night sheen takes over. A moon of cistercian pallor Has climbed to the center of heaven, installed, Finally involved with the business of darkness. And a sigh heaves from all the small things on earth, The books, the papers, the old garters and union-suit bu*tons Kept in a white cardboard box somewhere, and all the lower Versions of cities flattened under the equalizing night. The summer demands and takes away too much, But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes.