Where You Are There’s My Name

For John Ashbery

Patrons were invited

To guess the time:
The clock was always wrong,
Even when in the split
Of the most exact telling, or as
Precise as time gets in this precinct, policy’s
Fullest fruiting  and envied
By  the trashcan full of flame.

Time was mostly underground,

Slips and splutters girt
By everything but earth.  This took
No getting used to: nobody knew!
No-one clothed their torsos; dew
Gave everyone a full suit of buttons
Which the philanthropists fed to the birds
Like an anorexic man with a muffin.

A little later that dawn,

Like a crocus, time shot through
His path; the nearby fire
Turned the pistils blue, the petals
Pink, and every bench vanished
As if to say there should be no
Place from which to view
Speed and its bones, rags, their cleansing stones.