by John Ashbery
Why not now? The boy seemed to have fallen
From shelf to shelf of someone’s rage.
That night it rained on the boxcars, explaining
The thought of the pensive cabbage roses near the boxcars.
My boy. Isn’t there something I asked you once?
What happened? It’s also farther to the corner
Aboard the maple furniture. He
Couldn’t lie. He’d tell ’em by their syntax.
But listen now in the flood.
They’re throwing up behind the lines.
Dry fields of lightning rise to receive
The observer, the mincing flag. An unendurable age.
Glazunoviana
The man with the red hat
And the polar bear, is he here too?
The window giving on shade,
Is that here too?
And all the little helps,
My initials in the sky,
The hay of an arctic summer night?
The bear
Drops dead in sight of the window.
Lovely tribes have just moved to the north.
In the flickering evening the martins grow denser.
Rivers of wings surround us and vast tribulation.
The Hero
Whose face is this
stiff against the blue trees,
Lifted to the future
Because there is no end?
But that has faded
Like flowers, like the first days
Of good conduct. Visit
The strong man. Pinch him—
There is no end to his
Dislike, the accurate one.
Poem
While we were walking under the top
The road so strangely lit by lamps
And I wanting only peace
From the tradesmen who tried cutting my hair
Under their lips a white word is waiting
Hanging from a cliff like the sky
It is because of the sky
We ever reached the top
On that day of waiting
For the hand and the lamps
I moisten my crystal hair
Never so calmly as when at peace
With the broken sky of peace
Peace means it to the sky
Let down your hair
Through peaceful air the top
Of ruins because what are lamps
When night is waiting
A room of people waiting
To die in peace
Then strike the procession of lamps
They brought more than sky
Lungs back to the top
Means to doom your hair
Those bright pads of hair
Before the sea held back waiting
And you cannot speak to the top
It moves toward peace
And know the day of sky
Only by falling lamps
Beyond the desert lamps
Mount enslaved crystal mountains of hair
Into the day of sky
Silence is waiting
For anything peace
And you find the top
The top is lamps
Peace to the fragrant hair
Waiting for a tropical sky
Album Leaf
The other marigolds and the cloths
Are crimes invented for history.
What can we achieve, aspiring?
And what, aspiring, can we achieve?
What can the rain that fell
All day on the grounds
And on the bingo tables?
Even though it is clearing,
The statue turned to a sweeter light,
The nearest patrons are black.
Then there is a storm of receipts: night,
Sand the bowl did not let fall.
The other marigolds are scattered like dust.
Sweet peas in dark gardens
Squirt false melancholy over history.
If a bug fell from so high, would it land?
The Picture of Little J. A.
in a Prospect of Flowers
He was spoilt from childhood by the future,
which he mastered rather early and
apparently without great difficulty.
BORIS PASTERNAK
I
Darkness falls like a wet sponge
And Dick gives Genevieve a swift punch
In the pajamas. “Aroint thee, witch.”
Her tongue from previous ecstasy
Releases thoughts like little hats.
“He clap’d me first during the eclipse.
Afterwards I noted his manner
Much altered. But he sending
At that time certain handsome jewels
I durst not seem to take offence.”
In a far recess of summer
Monks are playing soccer.
II
So far is goodness a mere memory
Or naming of recent scenes of badness
That even these lives, children,
You may pass through to be blessed,
So fair does each invent his virtue.
And coming from a white world, music
Will sparkle at the lips of many who are
Beloved. Then these, as dirty handmaidens
To some transparent witch, will dream
Of a white hero’s subtle wooing,
And time shall force a gift on each.
That beggar to whom you gave no cent
Striped the night with his strange descant.
III
Yet I cannot escape the picture
Of my small self in that bank of flowers:
My head among the blazing phlox
Seemed a pale and gigantic fungus.
I had a hard stare, accepting
Everything, taking nothing,
As though the rolled-up future might stink
As loud as stood the sick moment
The shutter clicked. Though I was wrong,
Still, as the loveliest feelings
Must soon find words, and these, yes,
Displace them, so I am not wrong
In calling this comic version of myself
The true one. For as change is horror,
Virtue is really stubbornness
And only in the light of lost words
Can we imagine our rewards.
Pantoum
Eyes shining without mystery,
Footprints eager for the past
Through the vague snow of many clay pipes,
And what is in store?
Footprints eager for the past,
The usual obtuse blanket.
And what is in store
For those dearest to the king?
The usual obtuse blanket
Of legless regrets and amplifications
For those dearest to the king.
Yes, sirs, connoisseurs of oblivion,
Of legless regrets and amplifications,
That is why a watchdog is shy.
Yes, sirs, connoisseurs of oblivion,
These days are short, brittle; there is only one night.
That is why a watchdog is shy,
Why the court, trapped in a silver storm, is dying.
These days are short, brittle; there is only one night
And that soon gotten over.
Why, the court, trapped in a silver storm, is dying!
Some blunt pretense to safety we have
And that soon gotten over
For they must have motion.
Some blunt pretense to safety we have:
Eyes shining without mystery
For they must have motion
Through the vague snow of many clay pipes.
Grand Abacus
Perhaps this valley too leads into the head of long-ago days.
What, if not its commercial and etiolated visage, could break through the meadow wires?
It placed a
chair in the meadow and then went far away.
People come to visit in summer, they do not think about the head.
Soldiers come down to see the head. The stick hides from them.
The heavens say, “Here I am, boys and girls!”
The stick tries to hide in the noise. The leaves, happy, drift over the dusty meadow.
“I’d like to see it,” someone said about the head, which has stopped pretending to be a town.
Look! A ghastly change has come over it. The ears fall off—they are laughing people.
The skin is perhaps children, they say, “We children,” and are vague near the sea. The eyes—
Wait! What large raindrops! The eyes—
Wait, can’t you see them pattering, in the meadow, like a dog?
The eyes are all glorious! And now the river comes to sweep away the last of us.
Who knew it, at the beginning of the day?
It is best to travel like a comet, with the others, though one does not see them.
How far that bridle flashed! “Hurry up, children!” The birds fly back, they say, “We were lying,
We do not want to fly away.” But it is already too late. The children have vanished.
The Mythological Poet
I
The music brought us what it seemed
We had long desired, but in a form
So rarefied there was no emptiness
Of sensation, as if pleasure
Might persist, like a dear friend
Walking toward one in a dream.
It was the toothless murmuring
Of ancient willows, who kept their trouble
In a stage of music. Without tumult
Snow-capped mountains and heart-shaped
Cathedral windows were contained
There, until only infinity
Remained of beauty. Then lighter than the air
We rose and packed the picnic basket.
But there is beside us, they said,
Whom we do not sustain, the world
Of things, that rages like a virgin
Next to our silken thoughts. It can
Be touched, they said. It cannot harm.
But suddenly their green sides
Foundered, as if the virgin beat
Their airy trellis from within.
Over her furious sighs, a new
Music, innocent and monstrous
As the ocean’s bright display of teeth
Fell on the jousting willows. We
Are sick, they said. It is a warning
We were not meant to understand.
II
The mythological poet, his face
Fabulous and fastidious, accepts
Beauty before it arrives. The heavenly
Moment in the heaviness of arrival
Deplores him. He is merely
An ornament, a kind of lewd
Cloud placed on the horizon.
Close to the zoo, acquiescing
To dust, candy, perverts; inserted in
The panting forest, or openly
Walking in the great and sullen square
He has eloped with all music
And does not care. For isn’t there,
He says, a final diversion, greater
Because it can be given, a gift
Too simple even to be despised?
And oh beside the roaring
Centurion of the lion’s hunger
Might not child and pervert
Join hands, in the instant
Of their interest, in the shadow
Of a million boats; their hunger
From loss grown merely a gesture?
Sonnet
Each servant stamps the reader with a look.
After many years he has been brought nothing.
The servant’s frown is the reader’s patience.
The servant goes to bed.
The patience rambles on
Musing on the library’s lofty holes.
His pain is the servant’s alive.
It pushes to the top stain of the wall
Its tree-top’s head of excitement:
Baskets, birds, beetles, spools.
The light walls collapse next day.
Traffic is the reader’s pictured face.
Dear, be the tree your sleep awaits;
Worms be your words, you not safe from ours.
Chaos
Don’t ask me to go there again
The white is too painful
Better to forget it
the sleeping river spoke to the awake land
When they first drew the wires
across the field
slowly air settled
on the pools
The blue mirror came to light
Then someone feared the pools
To be armor enough might not someone
draw down the sky
Light emerged
The swimming motion
At last twilight that will not protect the leaves
Death that will not try to scream
Black beaches
That is why I sent you the black postcard that will never deafen
That is why land urges the well
The white is running in its grooves
The river slides under our dreams
but land flows more silently
The Orioles
What time the orioles came flying
Back to the homes, over the silvery dikes and seas,
The sad spring melted at a leap,
The shining clouds came over the hills to meet them.
The old house guards its memories; the birds
Stream over colored snow in summer
Or back into the magic rising sun in winter.
They cluster at the feeding station, and rags of song
Greet the neighbors. “Was that your voice?”
And in spring the mad caroling continues long after daylight
As each builds his hanging nest
Of pliant twigs and the softest moss and grasses.
But one morning you get up and the vermilion-colored
Messenger is there, bigger than life at the window.
“I take my leave of you; now I fly away
To the sunny reeds and marshes of my winter home.”
And that night you gaze moodily
At the moonlit apple-blossoms, for of course
Horror and repulsion do exist! They do! And you wonder,
How long will the perfumed dung, the sunlit clouds cover my heart?
And then some morning when the snow is flying
Or it lines the black fir-trees, the light cries,
The excited songs start up in the yard!
The feeding station is glad to receive its guests,
But how long can the stopover last?
The cold begins when the last song retires,
And even when they wing against the trees in bright formation
You know the peace they brought was long overdue.
The Young Son
The screen of supreme good fortune curved his absolute smile into a celestial scream. These things (the most arbitrary that could exist) wakened denials, thoughts of putrid reversals as he traced the green paths to and fro. Here and there a bird sang, a rose silenced her expression of him, and all the gaga flowers wondered. But they puzzled the wanderer with their vague wearinesses. Is the conclusion, he asked, the road forced by concubines from exact meters of strategy? Surely the trees are hinged to no definite purpose or surface. Yet now a wonder would shoot up, all one color, and virtues would jostle each other to get a view of nothing—the crowded house, two faces glued fast to the mirror, corners and the bustling forest ever preparing, ever menacing its own shape with a shadow of the evil defenses gotten up and in fact already exhausted in some void of darkness, some kingdom he knew the earth could not even bother to avoid if the minutes arranged and divine lettermen with smiling cries were to come in the
evening of administration and night which no cure, no bird ever more compulsory, no subject apparently intent on its heart’s own demon would forestall even if the truths she told of were now being seriously lit, one by one, in the hushed and fast darkening room.
The Thinnest Shadow
He is sherrier
And sherriest.
A tall thermometer
Reflects him best.
Children in the street
Watch him go by.
“Is that the thinnest shadow?”
They to one another cry.
A face looks from the mirror
As if to say,
“Be supple, young man,
Since you can’t be gay.”
All his friends have gone
From the street corner cold.
His heart is full of lies
And his eyes are full of mold.
Canzone
Until the first chill
No door sat on the clay.
When Billy brought on the chill
He began to chill.
No hand can
Point to the chill
It brought. Where a chill
Was, the grass grows.
See how it grows.
Acts punish the chill
Showing summer in the grass.
The acts are grass.
Acts of our grass
Transporting chill
Over brazen grass
That retorts as grass
Leave the clay,
The grass,
And that which is grass.
The far formal forest can,
Used doubts can
Sit on the grass.
Hark! The sadness grows
In pain. The shadow grows.
All that grows
In deep shadow or grass
Is lifted to what grows.
Walking, a space grows.
Beyond, weeds chill
Toward night which grows.
Looking about, nothing grows.
Now a whiff of clay
Respecting clay
Or that which grows
Brings on what can.
And no one can.
The sprinkling can
Slumbered on the dock. Clay
Leaked from a can.
Normal heads can
Touch barbed-wire grass
If they can
Sing the old song of can
