Last Month

By John Ashbery b. 1927 John Ashbery

No changes of support—only

Patches of gray, here where sunlight fell.

The house seems heavier

Now that they have gone away.

In fact it emptied in record time.

When the flat table used to result

A match recedes, slowly, into the night.

The academy of the future is

Opening its doors and willing

The fruitless sunlight streams into domes,

The chairs piled high with books and papers.

The sedate one is this month’s skittish one

Confirming the property that,

A timeless value, has changed hands.

And you could have a new automobile

Ping pong set and garage, but the thief

Stole everything like a miracle.

In his book there was a picture of treason only

And in the garden, cries and colors.

Source: The Mooring of Starting Out: The First Five Books of Poetry (Ecco Press, 1997)

Biography

John Ashbery is recognized as one of the greatest twentieth-century American poets. He has won nearly every major American award for poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Yale Younger Poets Prize, the Bollingen Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Griffin International Award, and a MacArthur “Genius” Grant. Ashbery's poetry challenges its readers to discard all presumptions about the aims, themes, . . .

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