Like a Photograph

You might like to live in one of these smallish
houses that to climb a hill, then fumble
back to the beginning, as though nothing had happened.

You might enjoy a dinner of sandwiches
with the neighbor who makes concessions.
It will all be over in a minute, you said. We both
believed that, and the clock's ticking: Flame on, flame on.

John Ashbery, A Worldly Country: New Poems, Ecco, 2007.