Linseed Oil
i.m John Ashbery
Seriously though, I don’t think you comprehend
The magnitude of what we’re looking at
Not enough pairs of white socks
The sounds of crows cawing behind us
Plans without maps
Maps without sufficient colors
As if our employment were merely temporary
Which I suppose it is
Like everything else in this joint
Hard to emerge from the long shadow of the master
Possibly impossible
A breeze picks up
Feeble sunlight grazes the leaves
The air smacks of distant fires
But we can still breathe
Then change into something more comfortable
You better believe it
Poking at memory with a stick
Who goes there?
Lend me your ears
Rome was not built overnight
Nothing better to do
In which case forget it
Time is an elastic band
For wrapping cables when you tear down the set
Easy to speak lightly of it later
Hard to save while using
What we say to each other
Should be plain and wide
Like a body at rest
But gets tripped up
In the welter of everything else
Not a bad thing
When you consider the great escape
Into thin air
Of our impressions
The wherewithal gets lost en route
The color of alphabet soup
Soon everyone is picking favorites
Or pushing up daisies
As the case may be
A case each of red and white vocabularies
To be opened whenever the spirit moves one
Early and often
Or after they’ve all gone home
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