SHELTERING AT HOME
But sometimes standing still is also life.
John Ashbery
I hate it---but then home
Was always a place to depart from
Or come back to, not a state of being in itself.
In the morning it’s my face in the mirror
And the newspaper in an easy chair, but then
I’m back on the shelf for the rest of the day,
While outside the weather has its way
And it’s not good. Now and then I go for a drive
To prove the existence of an external world
Of houses and trees and no people, but most of the time
I stay in my room, while Diane works in her study.
The nostalgia for the ordinary, for the world
Of just a month or so ago keeps overwhelming me,
Although my life then was the same as it is now.
We live in our imaginations, and if the world
Isn’t up to them our lives aren’t either: instead of
Lofting us “above this Frame of things,”
They sink back into it, yet continue somehow.
“Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance”
Is a kind of travelogue that culminates in a childhood
Far away from home, in a way of remaining alone
Without knowing it, of not knowing where or what you are.
Driving in my car to Wingspread or Port Washington,
I realize I’m going there instead of staying home
Because I want to, but also because without a destination
Life feels like nowhere, like a story without an ending
Or a vast metropolis that takes you in and leaves you on your own.
I know it’s moods and cabin fever, but what is there to go on
But a sense of purpose, however small? What is it but a travelogue,
Even when you’re inside---especially when you’re inside,
Where you think you’re free to roam because there’s no place else to go?
Let’s face it---you can’t. We like to think of the imagination
As inexhaustible and transcendent, but it’s as earthbound as we are
As we cling to an idea of someplace better than the one we have.
You believe you see it through the window, but it’s just your own
Reflection in the mirror, in the morning when the world
Feels simultaneously too close and too far away. It isn’t home
Or even close to home, and yet it’s where and what you are.
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