My Sleep with Me Podcast Community Facebook Group Post

"This Configuration"
by John Ashbery
Paris Review, Issue no. 79 (Spring 1981)

This movie deals with the epidemic of the way we live now.
What an inane card player. And the age may support it.
Each time the rumble of the age
Is an anthill in the distance.

As he slides the first rumpled card
Out of his dirty ruffled shirtfront the cartoon
Of the new age has begun its ascent
Around all of us like a gauze spiral staircase in which
Some stars have been imbedded.

It is the modern trumpets
Who decide the mood or tenor of this cross-section:
Of the people who get up in the morning, 
Still half-asleep. That they shouldn’t have fun. 
But something scary will come 
To get them anyway. You might as well linger 
On verandas, enjoying life, knowing 
The end is essentially unpredictable. 
It might be soldiers 
Marching all day, millions of them 
Past this sport, like the lozenge pattern 
Of these walls, like, finally, a kind of sleep.

Or it may be that we are ordinary people
With not unreasonable desires which we can satisfy
From time to time without causing cataclysms
That keep getting louder and more forceful instead of dying away.

Or it may be that we and the other people
Confused with us on the sidewalk have entered
A moment of seeming to be natural, expected,
And we see ourselves at the moment we see them:
Figures of an afternoon, of a century they extended.