From “Grand Galop” by John Ashbery
Ask a hog what is happening. Go on. Ask him.
The road just seems to vanish
And not that far in the distance, either. The horizon must have been
moved up.
So it is that by limping carefully
From one day to the next, one approaches a worn, round stone
Crouching low in the hollow of a gully
With no door or window but a lot of old license plates
Tacked up over a slit too narrow for a wrist to pass through
And a sign: “Van Camp’s Pork and Beans.”
From then on in: angst-colored skies, emotional withdrawals
As the whole business starts to frighten even you,
Its originator and promoter. The horizon returns
As a smile of recognition this time, polite, unquestioning.
How long ago high school graduation seems
Yet it cannot have been so very long:
One has traveled such a short distance.
The styles haven’t changed much,
And I still have a sweater and one or two other things I had then.
It seems only yesterday that we saw
The movie with the cows in it
And turned to one at your side, who burped
As morning saw a new garnet-and-pea-green order propose
Itself out of the endless bathos, like science-fiction lumps.
Impossible not to be moved by the tiny number
Those people wore, indicating they should be raised to this or
that power.
But now we are at Cape Fear and the overland trail
Is impassable, and a dense curtain of mist hangs over the sea.
Selected Poems, 1985, pp. 178-79