by John Ashbery
Waiting for a chill
In the chill
That without a can
Is painting less clay
Therapeutic colors of clay.
We got out into the clay
As a boy can.
Yet there’s another kind of clay
Not arguing clay,
As time grows
Not getting larger, but mad clay
Looked for for clay,
And grass
Begun seeming, grass
Struggling up out of clay
Into the first chill
To be quiet and raucous in the chill.
The chill
Flows over burning grass.
Not time grows.
So odd lights can
Fall on sinking clay.
Errors
Jealousy. Whispered weather reports.
In the street we found boxes
Littered with snow, to burn at home.
What flower tolling on the waters
You stupefied me. We waxed,
Carnivores, late and alight
In the beaded winter. All was ominous, luminous.
Beyond the bed’s veils the white walls danced
Some violent compunction. Promises,
We thought then of your dry portals,
Bright cornices of eavesdropping palaces,
You were painfully stitched to hours
The moon now tears up, coffing at the unrinsed portions.
And love’s adopted realm. Flees to water,
The coach dissolving in mists.
A wish
Refines the lines around the mouth
At these ten-year intervals. It fumed
Clear air of wars. It desired
Excess of core in all things. From all things sucked
A glossy denial. But look, pale day:
We fly hence. To return if sketched
In the prophet’s silence. Who doubts it is true?
Illustration
I
A novice was sitting on a cornice
High over the city. Angels
Combined their prayers with those
Of the police, begging her to come off it.
One lady promised to be her friend.
“I do not want a friend,” she said.
A mother offered her some nylons
Stripped from her very legs. Others brought
Little offerings of fruit and candy,
The blind man all his flowers. If any
Could be called successful, these were,
For that the scene should be a ceremony
Was what she wanted. “I desire
Monuments,” she said. “I want to move
Figuratively, as waves caress
The thoughtless shore. You people I know
Will offer me every good thing
I do not want. But please remember
I died accepting them.” With that, the wind
Unpinned her bulky robes, and naked
As a roc’s egg, she drifted softly downward
Out of the angels’ tenderness and the minds of men.
II
Much that is beautiful must be discarded
So that we may resemble a taller
Impression of ourselves. Moths climb in the flame,
Alas, that wish only to be the flame:
They do not lessen our stature.
We twinkle under the weight
Of indiscretions. But how could we tell
That of the truth we know, she was
The somber vestment? For that night, rockets sighed
Elegantly over the city, and there was feasting:
There is so much in that moment!
So many attitudes toward that flame,
We might have soared from earth, watching her glide
Aloft, in her peplum of bright leaves.
But she, of course, was only an effigy
Of indifference, a miracle
Not meant for us, as the leaves are not
Winter’s because it is the end.
Some Trees
These are amazing: each
Joining a neighbor, as though speech
Were a still performance.
Arranging by chance
To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it, you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try
To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.
And glad not to have invented
Such comeliness, we are surrounded:
A silence already filled with noises,
A canvas on which emerges
A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.
Hotel Dauphin
It was not something identical with my carnation-world
But its smallest possession—a hair or a sneeze—
I wanted. I remember
Dreaming on tan plush the wrong dreams
Of asking fortunes, now lost
In what snows? Is there anything
We dare credit? And we get along.
The soul resumes its teachings. Winter boats
Are visible in the harbor. A child writes
“La pluie.” All noise is engendered
As we sit listening. I lose myself
In others’ dreams.
Why no vacation from these fortunes, from the white hair
Of the old? These dreams of tennis?
Fortunately, the snow, cutting like a knife,
Protects too itself from us.
Not so with this rouge I send to you
At old Christmas. Here the mysteries
And the color of holly are embezzled—
Poor form, poor watchman for my holidays,
My days of name-calling and blood-letting.
Do not fear the exasperation of death
(Whichever way I go is solitary)
Or the candles blown out by your passing.
It breathes a proper farewell, the panic
Under sleep like grave under stone,
Warning of sad renewals of the spirit.
In cheap gardens, fortunes. Or we might never depart.
The Painter
Sitting between the sea and the buildings
He enjoyed painting the sea’s portrait.
But just as children imagine a prayer
Is merely silence, he expected his subject
To rush up the sand, and, seizing a brush,
Plaster its own portrait on the canvas.
So there was never any paint on his canvas
Until the people who lived in the buildings
Put him to work: “Try using the brush
As a means to an end. Select, for a portrait,
Something less angry and large, and more subject
To a painter’s moods, or, perhaps, to a prayer.”
How could he explain to them his prayer
That nature, not art, might usurp the canvas?
He chose his wife for a new subject,
Making her vast, like ruined buildings,
As if, forgetting itself, the portrait
Had expressed itself without a brush.
Slightly encouraged, he dipped his brush
In the sea, murmuring a heartfelt prayer:
“My soul, when I paint this next portrait
Let it be you who wrecks the canvas.”
The news spread like wildfire through the buildings:
He had gone back to the sea for his subject.
Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!
Too exhausted even to lift his brush,
He provoked some artists leaning from the buildings
To malicious mirth: “We haven’t a pray
er
Now, of putting ourselves on canvas,
Or getting the sea to sit for a portrait!”
Others declared it a self-portrait.
Finally all indications of a subject
Began to fade, leaving the canvas
Perfectly white. He put down the brush.
At once a howl, that was also a prayer,
Arose from the overcrowded buildings.
They tossed him, the portrait, from the tallest of the buildings;
And the sea devoured the canvas and the brush
As though his subject had decided to remain a prayer.
And You Know
The girls, protected by gold wire from the gaze
Of the onrushing students, live in an atmosphere of vacuum
In the old schoolhouse covered with nasturtiums.
At night, comets, shooting stars, twirling planets,
Suns, bits of illuminated pumice, and spooks hang over the old place;
The atmosphere is breathless. Some find the summer light
Nauseous and damp, but there are those
Who are charmed by it, going out into the morning.
We must rest here, for this is where the teacher comes.
On his desk stands a vase of tears.
A quiet feeling pervades the playroom. His voice clears
Through the interminable afternoon: “I was a child once
Under the spangled sun. Now I do what must be done.
I teach reading and writing and flaming arithmetic. Those
In my home come to me anxiously at night, asking how it goes.
My door is always open. I never lie, and the great heat warms me.”
His door is always open, the fond schoolmaster!
We ought to imitate him in our lives,
For as a man lives, he dies. To pass away
In the afternoon, on the vast vapid bank
You think is coming to crown you with hollyhocks and lilacs, or in gold at the opera,
Requires that one shall have lived so much! And not merely
Asking questions and giving answers, but grandly sitting,
Like a great rock, through many years.
It is the erratic path of time we trace
On the globe, with moist fingertip, and surely, the globe stops;
We are pointing to England, to Africa, to Nigeria;
And we shall visit these places, you and I, and other places,
Including heavenly Naples, queen of the sea, where I shall be king and you will be queen,
And all the places around Naples.
So the good old teacher is right, to stop with his finger on Naples, gazing out into the mild December afternoon
As his star pupil enters the classroom in that elaborate black and yellow creation.
He is thinking of her flounces, and is caught in them as if they were made of iron, they will crush him to death!
Goodbye, old teacher, we must travel on, not to a better land, perhaps,
But to the England of the sonnets, Paris, Colombia, and Switzerland
And all the places with names, that we wish to visit—
Strasbourg, Albania,
The coast of Holland, Madrid, Singapore, Naples, Salonika, Liberia, and Turkey.
So we leave you behind with her of the black and yellow flounces.
You were always a good friend, but a special one.
Now as we brush through the clinging leaves we seem to hear you crying;
You want us to come back, but it is too late to come back, isn’t it?
It is too late to go to the places with the names (what were they, anyway? just names).
It is too late to go anywhere but to the nearest star, that one, that hangs just over the hill, beckoning
Like a hand of which the arm is not visible. Goodbye, Father! Goodbye, pupils. Goodbye, my master and my dame.
We fly to the nearest star, whether it be red like a furnace, or yellow,
And we carry your lessons in our hearts (the lessons and our hearts are the same)
Out of the humid classroom, into the forever. Goodbye, Old Dog Tray.
And so they have left us feeling tired and old.
They never cared for school anyway.
And they have left us with the things pinned on the bulletin board,
And the night, the endless, muggy night that is invading our school.
He
He cuts down the lakes so they appear straight
He smiles at his feet in their tired mules.
He turns up the music much louder.
He takes down the vaseline from the pantry shelf.
He is the capricious smile behind the colored bottles.
He eats not lest the poor want some.
He breathes of attitudes the piney altitudes.
He indeed is the White Cliffs of Dover.
He knows that his neck is frozen.
He snorts in the vale of dim wolves.
He writes to say, “If ever you visit this island,
He’ll grow you back to your childhood.
“He is the liar behind the hedge
He grew one morning out of candor.
He is his own consolation prize.
He has had his eye on you from the beginning.”
He hears the weak cut down with a smile.
He waltzes tragically on the spitting housetops.
He is never near. What you need
He cancels with the air of one making a salad.
He is always the last to know.
He is strength you once said was your bonnet.
He has appeared in “Carmen.”
He is after us. If you decide
He is important, it will get you nowhere.
He is the source of much bitter reflection.
He used to be pretty for a rat.
He is now over-proud of his Etruscan appearance.
He walks in his sleep into your life.
He is worth knowing only for the children
He has reared as savages in Utah.
He helps his mother take in the clothes-line.
He is unforgettable as a shooting star.
He is known as “Liverlips.”
He will tell you he has had a bad time of it.
He will try to pretend his pressagent is a temptress.
He looks terrible on the stairs.
He cuts himself on what he eats.
He was last seen flying to New York.
He was handing out cards which read:
“He wears a question in his left eye.
He dislikes the police but will associate with them.
He will demand something not on the menu.
He is invisible to the eyes of beauty and culture.
“He prevented the murder of Mistinguett in Mexico.
He has a knack for abortions. If you see
He is following you, forget him immediately:
He is dangerous even though asleep and unarmed.”
Meditations of a Parrot
Oh the rocks and the thimble
The oasis and the bed
Oh the jacket and the roses.
All sweetly stood up the sea to me
Like blue cornflakes in a white bowl.
The girl said, “Watch this.”
I come from Spain, I said.
I was purchased at a fair.
She said, “None of us know.
“There was a house once
Of dazzling canopies
And halls like a keyboard.
“These the waves tore in pieces.”
(His old wound—
And all day: Robin Hood! Robin Hood!)
Sonnet
The barber at his chair
Clips me. He does as he goes.
He clips the hairs outside the nose.
Too many preparations, nose!
I see the raincoat this Saturday.
A building is against the sky—
The result is
more sky.
Something gathers in painfully.
To be the razor—how would you like to be
The razor, blue with ire,
That presses me? This is the wrong way.
The canoe speeds toward a waterfall.
Something, prince, in our backward manners—
You guessed the reason for the storm.
A Long Novel
What will his crimes become, now that her hands
Have gone to sleep? He gathers deeds
In the pure air, the agent
Of their factual excesses. He laughs as she inhales.
If it could have ended before
It began—the sorrow, the snow
Dropping, dropping its fine regrets.
The myrtle dries about his lavish brow.
He stands quieter than the day, a breath
In which all evils are one.
He is the purest air. But her patience,
The imperative Become, trembles
Where hands have been before. In the foul air
Each snowflake seems a Piranesi
Dropping in the past; his words are heavy
With their final meaning. Milady! Mimosa! So the end
Was the same: the discharge of spittle
Into frozen air. Except that, in a new
Humorous landscape, without music,
Written by music, he knew he was a saint,
While she touched all goodness
As golden hair, knowing its goodness
Impossible, and waking and waking
As it grew in the eyes of the beloved.
The Way They Took
The green bars on you grew soberer
As I petted the lock, a crank
In my specially built shoes.
We hedged about leisure, feeling, walking
That day, that night. The day
Came up. The heads borne in peach vessels
Out of asking that afternoon droned.
You saw the look of some other people,
Huge husks of chattering boys
And girls unfathomable in lovely dresses
And remorseful and on the edge of darkness.
No firmness in that safe smile ebbing.
Tinkling sadness. The sun pissed on a rock.
That is how I came nearer
To what was on my shoulder. One day you were lunching
With a friend’s mother; I thought how plebeian all this testimony,
That you might care to crave that, somehow
Before I would decide. Just think,
But I know now how romantic, how they whispered
