Wakefulness

by John Ashbery

Progressive awakenings occur in all these verses. Each sense is engaged, and there is a search for epiphanies of the spirit, too. We are in history but also in the present - in buildings, churches, homes, trains, and cars; then back in the open pursuing the course to Baltimore and Bucharest, to the zoo and the park, to the past and the future. The digressions are wily, heartbreaking, or vertiginous. The clock ticks on, yet the tactics of survival and enhancement set forth in these poems invoke an ideal permanence.