In sooth, I come here sadly
not trembling, not against my will,
hoping you will set the record straight.
You can, you know, in a minute
if the wind is right and no felon intervenes.
And we sit and you tell me how crazy I am.
I shall petition the other board members
but am afraid nothing will ever come right.
It has been going on too long for this to happen,
yet it was right to go, to go on as it did,
even if there was a strangeness in the rightness
that no one can see now. They see the night
in its undress, plaits unplaited, brushed,
the sound of the surf churning on distant rocks,
can think only about how heavenly it would have been
if it had all happened later of differently.
Now, according to some sources,
new golfing trends are a commodity,
along with silence, and sweetness.
Doucement, doucement …
And when the sweetness is adjusted,
why, we’ll know more than some do now.
That is all I can offer you,
my lost, my beloved one.
—John Ashbery, “Strange Cinema”
Photo Credit James Siena
