Happy Birthday John Ashbb [to release it from its condition of hardness you will have to take apart the notion of you]
These are examples of leaving out.
… To be your breath as it is taken in and shoved out. Then, quietly, it would be as objects placed along the top of a wall: remembering just how the light stood on the water that time. Inside each other, moving upward
like penance.
like the face on a deflated balloon, shifted into wrinkles, permanent and
matter-of-fact.
Because life is short
We must remember to keep asking it the same question
Until the repeated question and the same silence become answer
In words broken open and pressed to the mouth
And the last silence reveal the lining,
the people who timidly inhabit it, the fuzzy first thought that gets started in you and then there’s no stopping it.
But it is your landscape, the proof that you are there.
“Pyrography: Poem and Portrait of John Ashbery II,” by Larry Rivers (1977)