I’ve been scared of reading John Ashbery, but I had half an hour to kill at Blackwell’s yesterday and I slowly made my way through his poem “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”. Here is how it ends:

We have seen the city; it is the gibbous

Mirrored eye of an insect. All things happen

On its balcony and are resumed within,

But the action is the cold, syrupy flow

Of a pageant. One feels too confined,

Sifting the April sunlight for clues,

In the mere stillness of the ease of its

Parameter. The hand holds no chalk

And each part of the whole falls off

And cannot know it knew, except

Here and there, in cold pockets

Of remembrance, whispers out of time.

I’ve been missing out.