continuum

And what about what was there before?

This is shaped in the new merging, like ancestral smiles, common memories, remembering just how the light stood on the water that time. But it is also something new. Outside, can't you hear it, the traffic, the trees, everything getting nearer. To end up with, inside each other, moving upward like penance. For the continual pilgrimage has not stopped. It is only that you are both moving at the same rate of speed and cannot apprehend the motion.

-- John Ashbery, from "The New Spirit"

Listen to John Ashbery reading an excerpt of "The New Spirit" here (Side Two of The Songs We Know Best)

John Ashbery