Counterpane

Ma chambre a la forme d'une cage
                                -- Apollinaire


One might as well pick up the pieces.
What else are they for? And interrupt someone's organ recital--
we are interruptions, aren't we? I mean in the highest sense
of a target, welcoming all the dust and noise
as though we were the city's apron.

Going out has another factor about it--
the mineral salts that have leached through our wall
staining it untoward colors, yet we wait
for them, the peace goes on in our mouth.

Sometimes suicide seems like a neat solution--
"elegant," as mathematicians say,
and it's too late to be counted out.
But the black tide mounting in us is probably the best

method. It makes you want to exercise
and simultaneously gasp, give up resting
and spend a little time with a book, or encourage the vine to grow.
We'll need all the feelers we can get come December,

so go on putting them out. Operators are waiting to take your call,
overloaded trunk lines bawling regret,
yet the one answer, when it comes, isn't particularly cogent,
though it means well, inviting us to rest on sparse laurels

and drilling a little fancy into the brain next door.
"How's about it, Chief? Gotten in any smooth ones yet?"
That wisteria sky has to become a sea of comfort
on which we're cut adrift with lots of friendly goats and ghosts.

Life is a warehouse sale for the initiated,
i.e., those who know where to go and find it,
then make it back to the abandoned comb
we've thought about so intensely across the spruced-up years.


-- John Ashbery