Meanwhile we live in the paperweight of swirling blizzards
and little toy buses painted vermilion like the sky
when it rises up reasonably to our defense in the half-hour
after sunrise or before sunset and likes to, it likes
the idea of museums. Then so much of us is fetched away.
Often you think you can see or even smell some part of it
before it too is put away, used and put away. But then these
so recent nights would be part of the elaborate past, that old
contraption, the one we were never sure about--


excerpt from "Of Dreaming And Dreaming," John Ashbery