by John Ashbery
Disappeared down the block and the postman shouted
His daily rounds. The children under the trees knew it
But all the fathers returning home
On streetcars after a satisfying day at the office undid it:
The climate was still floral and all the wallpaper
In a million homes all over the land conspired to hide it.
One day we thought of painted furniture, of how
It just slightly changes everything in the room
And in the yard outside, and how, if we were going
To be able to write the history of our time, starting with today,
It would be necessary to model all these unimportant details
So as to be able to include them; otherwise the narrative
Would have that flat, sandpapered look the sky gets
Out in the middle west toward the end of summer,
The look of wanting to back out before the argument
Has been resolved, and at the same time to save appearances
So that tomorrow will be pure. Therefore, since we have to do our business
In spite of things, why not make it in spite of everything?
That way, maybe the feeble lakes and swamps
Of the back country will get plugged into the circuit
And not just the major events but the whole incredible
Mass of everything happening simultaneously and pairing off,
Channeling itself into history, will unroll
As carefully and as casually as a conversation in the next room,
And the purity of today will invest us like a breeze,
Only be hard, spare, ironical: something one can
Tip one’s hat to and still get some use out of.
The parade is turning into our street.
My stars, the burnished uniforms and prismatic
Features of this instant belong here. The land
Is pulling away from the magic, glittering coastal towns
To an aforementioned rendezvous with August and December.
The hunch is it will always be this way,
The look, the way things first scared you
In the night light, and later turned out to be,
Yet still capable, all the same, of a narrow fidelity
To what you and they wanted to become:
No sighs like Russian music, only a vast unraveling
Out toward the junctions and to the darkness beyond
To these bare fields, built at today’s expense.
The Gazing Grain
The tires slowly came to a rubbery stop.
Alliterative festoons in the sky noted
That this branchy birthplace of presidents was also
The big frigidaire-cum-cowbarn where mendicant
And margrave alike waited out the results
Of the natural elections. So any openness of song
Was the plainer way. O take me to the banks
Of your Mississippi over there, etc. Like a plant
Rooted in parched earth I am
A stranger myself in the dramatic lighting,
The result of war. That which is given to see
At any moment is the residue, shadowed
In gold or emerging into the clear bluish haze
Of uncertainty. We come back to ourselves
Through the rubbish of cloud and tree-spattered pavement.
These days stand like vapor under the trees.
Unctuous Platitudes
There is no reason for the surcharge to bother you.
Living in a city one is nonplussed by some
Of the inhabitants. The weather has grown gray with age.
Poltergeists go about their business, sometimes
Demanding a sweeping revision. The breath of the air
Is invisible. People stay
Next to the edges of fields, hoping that out of nothing
Something will come, and it does, but what? Embers
Of the rain tamp down the shitty darkness that issues
From nowhere. A man in her room, you say.
I like the really wonderful way you express things
So that it might be said, that of all the ways in which to
Emphasize a posture or a particular mental climate
Like this gray-violet one with a thin white irregular line
Descending the two vertical sides, these are those which
Can also unsay an infinite number of pauses
In the ceramic day. Every invitation
To every stranger is met at the station.
The Couple in the Next Room
She liked the blue drapes. They made a star
At the angle. A boy in leather moved in.
Later they found names from the turn of the century
Coming home one evening. The whole of being
Unknown absorbed into the stalk. A free
Bride on the rails warning to notice other
Hers and the great graves that outwore them
Like faces on a building, the lightning rod
Of a name calibrated all their musing differences.
Another day. Deliberations are recessed
In an iron-blue chamber of that afternoon
On which we wore things and looked well at
A slab of business rising behind the stars.
The Explanation
The luxury of now is that the cancelled gala has been
Put back in. The orchestra is starting to tune up.
The tone-row of a dripping faucet is batted back and forth
Among the kitchen, the confusion outside, the pale bluster
Of the sky, the correct but insidious grass.
The conductor, a glass of water, permits all kinds
Of wacky analogies to glance off him, and, circling outward,
To bring in the night. Nothing is too “unimportant”
Or too important, for that matter. The newspaper and the garbage
Wrapped in it, the over, the under.
You get thrown to one side
Into a kind of broom closet as the argument continues carolling
Ideas from the novel of which this is the unsuccessful
Stage adaptation. Too much, perhaps, gets lost.
What about arriving after sunset on the beach of a
Dank but extremely beautiful island to hear the speeches
Of the invisible natives, whose punishment is speech?
At the top of his teddy-bear throne, the ruler,
Still lit by the sun, gazes blankly across at something
Opposite. His eyes are empty rectangles, shaped
Like slightly curved sticks of chewing gum. He witnesses.
But we are the witnesses.
In the increasingly convincing darkness
The words become palpable, like a fruit
That is too beautiful to eat. We want these
Down here on our level. But the tedium persists
In the form of remarks exchanged by birds
Before the curtain. What am I doing up here?
Pretending to resist but secretly giving in so as to reappear
In a completely new outfit and group of colors once today’s
Bandage has been removed, is all.
Loving Mad Tom
You thought it was wrong. And afterwards
When everyone had gone out, their lying persisted in your ears,
Across the water. You didn’t see the miserable dawns piled up,
One after the other, stretching away. Their word only
Waited for you like the truth, and sometimes
Out of a pure, unintentional song, the meaning
Stammered nonetheless, and your zeal could see
To the opposite shore, where it was all coming true.
Then to lay it down like a load
And take up the dream stitching again, as though
It were still old, as on a bright, unseasonably cold
Afternoon, is a dream past living. Best to leave it there
And quickly tiptoe out. The music ended anyway. The occasions
In your arms went along with it and seemed
To supply the necessary sense. But like
A farmhouse in the city, on some busy, deserted metropolitan avenue,
It was all too much in the way it fell silent,
Forewarned, as though an invisible face looked out
From hooded windows, as the rain suddenly starts to fall
And the lightning goes crazy, and the thunder faints dead away.
That was a way of getting here,
He thought. A spear of fire, a horse of air,
And the rest is done for you, to go with the rest,
To match up with everything accomplished until now.
And always one stream is pointing north
To reeds and leaves, and the stunned land
Flowers in dejection. This station in the woods,
How was it built? This place
Of communicating back along the way, all the way back?
And in an orgy of minutes the waiting
Seeks to continue, to begin again,
Amid bugs, the harking of dogs, all the
Maddening irregularities of trees, and night falls anyway.
Business Personals
The disquieting muses again: what are “leftovers”?
Perhaps they have names for it all, who come bearing
Worn signs of privilege whose authority
Speaks out of the accumulation of age and faded colors
To the center of today. Floating heart, why
Wander on senselessly? The tall guardians
Of yesterday are steep as cliff shadows;
Whatever path you take abounds in their sense.
All presently lead downward, to the harbor view.
Therefore do your knees need to be made strong, by running.
We have places for the training and a special on equipment:
Knee-pads, balancing poles and the rest. It works
In the sense of aging: you come out always a little ahead
And not so far as to lose a sense of the crowd
Of disciples. That were tyranny,
Outrage, hubris. Meanwhile this tent is silence
Itself. Its walls are opaque, so as not to see
The road; a pleasant, half-heard melody climbs to its ceiling—
Not peace, but rest the doctor ordered. Tomorrow …
And songs climb out of the flames of the near campfires,
Pale, pastel things exquisite in their frailness
With a note or two to indicate it isn’t lost,
On them at least. The songs decorate our notion of the world
And mark its limits, like a frieze of soap-bubbles.
What caused us to start caring?
In the beginning was only sedge, a field of water
Wrinkled by the wind. Slowly
The trees increased the novelty of always being alone,
The rest began to be sketched in, and then … silence,
Or blankness, for a number of years. Could one return
To the idea of nature summed up in these pastoral images?
Yet the present has done its work of building
A rampart against the past, not a rampart,
A barbed-wire fence. So now we know
What occupations to stick to (scrimshaw, spinning tall tales)
By the way the songs deepen the color of the shadow
Impregnating your hobby as you bend over it,
Squinting. I could make a list
Of each one of my possessions and the direction it
Pointed in, how much each thing cost, how much for wood, string, colored ink, etc.
The song makes no mention of directions.
At most it twists the longitude lines overhead
Like twigs to form a crude shelter. (The ship
Hasn’t arrived, it was only a dream. It’s somewhere near
Cape Horn, despite all the efforts of Boreas to puff out
Those drooping sails.) The idea of great distance
Is permitted, even implicit in the slow dripping
Of a lute. How to get out?
This giant will never let us out unless we blind him.
And that’s how, one day, I got home.
Don’t be shocked that the old walls
Hang in rags now, that the rainbow has hardened
Into a permanent late afternoon that elicits too-long
Shadows and indiscretions from the bottom
Of the soul. Such simple things,
And we make of them something so complex it defeats us,
Almost. Why can’t everything be simple again,
Like the first words of the first song as they occurred
To one who, rapt, wrote them down and later sang them:
“Only danger deflects
The arrow from the center of the persimmon disc,
Its final resting place. And should you be addressing yourself
To danger? When it takes the form of bleachers
Sparsely occupied by an audience which has
Already witnessed the events of which you write,
Tellingly, in your log? Properly acknowledged
It will dissipate like the pale pink and blue handkerchiefs
That vanished centuries ago into the blue dome
That surrounds us, but which are, some maintain, still here.”
Crazy Weather
It’s this crazy weather we’ve been having:
Falling forward one minute, lying down the next
Among the loose grasses and soft, white, nameless flowers.
People have been making a garment out of it,
Stitching the white of lilacs together with lightning
At some anonymous crossroads. The sky calls
To the deaf earth. The proverbial disarray
Of morning corrects itself as you stand up.
You are wearing a text. The lines
Droop to your shoelaces and I shall never want or need
Any other literature than this poetry of mud
And ambitious reminiscences of times when it came easily
Through the then woods and ploughed fields and had
A simple unconscious dignity we can never hope to
Approximate now except in narrow ravines nobody
Will inspect where some late sample of the rare,
Uninteresting specimen might still be putting out shoots, for all we know.
On the Towpath
At the sign “Fred Muffin’s Antiques” they turned off the road into a narrow lane lined with shabby houses.
If the thirst would subside just for awhile
It would be a little bit, enough.
This has happened.
The insipid chiming of the seconds
Has given way to an arc of silence
So old it had never ceased to exist
On the roofs, of buildings, in the sky.
The ground is tentative.
The pygmies and jacaranda that were here yesterday
Are back today, only less so.
It is a barrier of fact
Shielding the sky from the earth.
On the earth a many-colored tower of longing rises.
There are many ads (to help pay for all this).
Something interesting is happening on every landing.
Ladies of the Second Empire gotten up as characters from Perrault:
Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, the Sleeping Beauty,
Are silhouetted against the stained-glass windows.
A white figure runs to the edge of some rampart
In a hurry only to observe the distance,
And having done so, drops back into the mass
Of clock-faces, spires, stalactite machicolations.
It was the walking sideways, visible from far away,
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nbsp; That told what it was to be known
And kept, as a secret is known and kept.
The sun fades like the spreading
Of a peacock’s tail, as though twilight
Might be read as a warning to those desperate
For easy solutions. This scalp of night
Doesn’t continue or break off the vacuous chatter
That went on, off and on, all day:
That there could be rain, and
That it could be like lines, ruled lines scored
Across the garden of violet cabbages,
That these and other things could stay on
Longer, though not forever of course;
That other commensals might replace them
And leave in their turn. No,
We aren’t meaning that any more.
The question has been asked
As though an immense natural bridge had been
Strung across the landscape to any point you wanted.
The ellipse is as aimless as that,
Stretching invisibly into the future so as to reappear
In our present. Its flexing is its account,
The return to the point of no return.
Melodic Trains
A little girl with scarlet enameled fingernails
Asks me what time it is—evidently that’s a toy wristwatch
She’s wearing, for fun. And it is fun to wear other
Odd things, like this briar pipe and tweed coat
Like date-colored sierras with the lines of seams
Sketched in and plunging now and then into unfathomable
Valleys that can’t be deduced by the shape of the person
Sitting inside it—me, and just as our way is flat across
Dales and gulches, as though our train were a pencil
Guided by a ruler held against a photomural of the Alps
We both come to see distance as something unofficial
And impersonal yet not without its curious justification
Like the time of a stopped watch—right twice a day.
Only the wait in stations is vague and
Dimensionless, like oneself. How do they decide how much
Time to spend in each? One begins to suspect there’s no
Rule or that it’s applied haphazardly.
Sadness of the faces of children on the platform,
Concern of the grownups for connections, for the chances
Of getting a taxi, since these have no timetable.
You get one if you can find one though in principle
