Is taste a human right ii

To become lost amid underperforming texts
the stranger won't answer. By which time
it was nosebleed territory anyway. The geese
had put away their young, then fled; all that remained
to be determined was local angst, over which who cares what
by sitters in a landscape, I say: how is this remote?
Yellow wine will rinse it all away, and how many of us
are there? Is it my imagination or must one foregather
to bring stuff in?

                  Long before that, the tocsin

had sounded in the autumn dell, Toxins were released.

One's by-now crystallized antipathy to daring new

solutions swamped local perennial borders.

Because at least getting too serious had reputable

antecedents. Being in the way didn't matter,

nor should it, yet who knows what embarrassments can leak

this way, foreground moony entertainments? Just a clench

suffices when their guard is up. The horse pilots,

sleeping rough in their thousands,

announced commodious outcomes contradicting too-prompt

displays of local affection. The broad petals of language

are stiff and may get very bad.

They make it very bad

in our language tutoring.

   Possibly you have noticed, too,

   that so few people seem to have

   heard the good news about them-

   selves. They want refreshment but

   ask, 'Give me the biggest red ya

   got', and this aspiration for

   punishment is but a consequence

   of deprivation, a means of sub-

   stantiating to themselves that

   they can take it and respect it.

   You see it everywhere, if not in

   every thing. 

   In growth there is a center that

   opens as balanced wine, unfold-

   ing congruently, responsively,

   gracefully, authentically, and

   lastingly. Which came first, the

   principle or the fact? Taste is

   an expression of the human trait

   of memory. We can watch expertise

   reviving as a birthright, across

   their features as they recompose.

  

John Ashbery

Quick Question

  New Poems

  Far Harbor

op. cit.