Terroir

I saw the reflection in the mirror

And it doesn't count, or not enough

To make a difference, fabricating itself 

Out of the old, average light of a college town,

And afterwards, when the bus trip 

Had depleted my pocket of its few pennies 

He was seen arguing behind steamed glass, 

With an invisible proprietor. What if you can't own

This one either? ..

      For it seems that all 

Moments are like this: thin, unsatisfactory

As gruel, worn away each time you return to them.

Until one day you rip the canvas from its frame

And take it home with you. You think the god-given 

Assertiveness in you has triumphed 

Over the stingy scenario: these objects are as real as meat, 

As tears. We are all soiled with this desire, at the last moment, 

the last.

   I am always in Hanover,
   New Hampshire, in the old
   college town, when I read
   this poem. Such associations
   are illegitimate grounds
   for criticism, and arbitrary
   to confide. But the isolated
   vitality of the place fits 
   the imagery, and the immedi-
   acy and distance in this poem, 
   very well. I have grown to
   admire the shocking final
   phrase unreservedly, the more
   I've understood how the last
   reflects the most precious and
   constant, persistent and con-
   sistent, likely and quotidian,
   in a contingency always at the
   last. What we call a masterpiece 
   we would love, anyway. Sometimes,
   it is.

John Ashbery

Shadow Train

  Drunken Americans

Penguin, 1981©