Every Evening When the Sun Goes Down

By John Ashbery

The helmeted head is tilted up at you again
Through a question. Booze and pills?
Probably it has no cachet or real status
Beyond the spokes of the web of good intentions

That radiate a certain distance out from the crater, that is the smile,
That began it? Do you see yourself
Covered by this uniform of half regrets and
Inadmissable satisfactions, dazzling as the shower

Sucked back up into the peacock's-feather eye in the sky
As though through a straw, to connect up with your brain,
The thing given you tonight to wrestle with like an angel
Until dawn? The snuffer says it better. The cone

Squelches the wick, the insulted smoke jerks ceilingward
In the long time since we have been afraid, while the host
Is looking for ice cubes and a glass, is gone
Into the similarity of firmaments. "One last question."