by John Ashbery
Whether in some deprived tropic or some
Boudoir-cave where it finds that just
Paving the interest on the bonanza is dressier.
Alas, but there are others, he thought, and we are children
Again, the children our parents were, trampling
Under foot the delicate boundary, last thing of day
Before night, that resurrects and comforts us here. Patience
Of articulation between us is still what it is,
No more and no less, but this time the night shift
Will have to be disturbed, and wiping out the quality
Of yesterday with the sponge of dreams is being phased out.
HE
You’re making a big mistake. Just because Goofus has been lucky for you, you imagine others will make a fuss over you, all the others, who will matriculate. You’ll be left with a trowel and a lot of empty flowerpots, imagining that the sun as it enters this window is somehow a blessing that will make up for everything else—those very years in the cold. That the running faucet is a sacred stream. That the glint of light from a silver ball on that far-off flagpole is the equivalent of a career devoted to life, to improving the minds and the welfare of others, when in reality it is a common thing like these, and less profitable than any hobby or sideline that is a source of retirement income, such as an antique stall, pecan harvest or root-beer stand. In short, although the broad outlines of your intentions are a credit to you, what fills them up isn’t. You are like someone whose face was photographed in a crowd scene once and then gradually retreated from people’s memories, and from life as well.
SHE
But the real “world”
Stretches its pretending into the side yard
Where I was waiting, at peace with my feelings, though now,
I see, resentful from the beginning for the change to happen
Like lilacs. We were walking
All along toward a door that seemed to recede
In the distance and now is somehow behind us, shut,
Though apparently it didn’t lock automatically. How
Wonderful the fields are. They are
Like love poetry, all the automatic breathing going on
All around, and there are enchanted, many-colored
Things like houses to explore, if there were time,
But the house is built under a waterfall. The slanting
Roof and the walls are made of opaque glass, and
The emerald-green wall-to-wall carpeting is sopping moss.
HE
And last, perhaps, as darkness
Begins to infuse the lawns and silent streets
And the remote estuary, and thickens here, you mention
The slamming of a door I wasn’t supposed to know about,
That took years. Each of us circles
Around some simple but vital missing piece of information,
And, at the end, as now, finding no substitute,
Writes his own mark grotesquely with a stick in snow,
The signature of many connected seconds of indecision.
What I am writing to say is, the timing, not
The contents, is what matters. All this could have happened
Long ago, or at least on some other day,
And not meant much except insofar as the eye
Extracts a progress from almost anything. But then
It wouldn’t have become a toy.
And all the myths,
Legends and misinterpretations, would have scattered
At a single pistol shot. And it would no longer know what I know.
SHE
It was arriving now, the eyes thick
With their black music, the wooden misquotable side
Thrust forward. Tell about the affair she’d had
With Bennett Palmer, the Minnesota highwayman,
Back when she was staying at Lake Geneva, Wisc.,
In the early forties. That paynim’d
Go to any lengths to shut her up, now,
Now that the time of truth telling from tall towers
Had come. Only old Thomas a Tattamus with his two tups
Seemed really to care. Even Ellen herself
Could muster but a few weak saws about loving—how it leaves us
Naked at a time when we would rather be clothed, and
She looked all around the room with a satisfied air.
Everything was in order, even unto bareness, waiting to receive
Whatever stamp or seal. The light coming in off the kale
In the kaleyard outside was like the joyous, ravening
Light over the ocean the morning after a storm.
It hadn’t betrayed her and it never would.
HE
To him, the holiday-making crowds were
Engines of a parallel disaster, the fulfilling
Of all prophecies between now and the day of
Judgment. Spiralling like fish,
Toward a distant, unperceived surface, was all
The reflection there was. Somewhere it had its opaque
Momentary existence.
But if each act
Is reflexive, concerned with itself on another level
As well as with us, the strangers who live here,
Can one advance one step further without sinking equally
Far back into the past? There was always something to see,
Something going on, for the historical past owed it
To itself, our historical present. Another month a huge
Used-car sale on the lawn shredded the sense of much
Of the sun coming through the wires, or a cape
Would be rounded by a slim white sail almost
Invisible in the specific design, or children would come
Clattering down fire escapes until the margin
Exploded into an ear of sky. Today the hospitals
Are light, airy places, tented clouds, and the weeping
In corridors is like autumn showers. It’s beginning.
*
Unless this is the shelf of whatever happens? The cold sunrise attacks one side of the giant capital letters, bestirs a little the landmass as it sinks, grateful but asleep. And you too are a rebus from another century, your fiction in piles like lace, in that a new way of appreciating has been invented, that tomorrow will be quantitatively and qualitatively different—young love, cheerful, insubstantial things—and that these notions have been paraded before, though never with the flashing density climbing higher with you on the beanstalk until the jewelled mosaic of hills, ploughed fields and rivers agreed to be so studied and fell away forever, a gash of laughter, a sneeze of gold dust into the prism that weeps and remains solid.
Well had she represented the patient’s history to his apathetic scrutiny. Always there was something to see, something going on, for the historical past owed it to itself, our historical present. There were visiting firemen, rumors of chattels on a spree, old men made up to look like young women in the polygon of night from which light sometimes breaks, to be sucked back, armies of foreigners who could not understand each other, the sickening hush just before the bleachers collapse, the inevitable uninvited and only guest who writes on the wall: I choose not to believe. It became a part of oral history. Things overheard in cafes assumed an importance previously reserved for letters from the front. The past was a dream of doctors and drugs. This wasn’t misspent time. Oh, sometimes it’d seem like doing the same thing over and over, until I had passed beyond whatever the sense of it had been. Besides, hadn’t it all ended a long time back, on some clear, washed-out afternoon, with a stiff breeze that seemed to shout: go back! For the moated past lives by these dreams of decorum that take into account any wisecracks made at their expense. It is not called living in a past. If history were only minding one’s business, but, once under the gray shade of mist drawn across us … And who am I to speak this way, into a shoe? I know that evening is busy wi
th lights, cars … That the curve will include me if I must stand here. My warm regards are cold, falling back to the vase again like a fountain. Responsible to whom? I have chosen this environment and it is handsome: a festive niching of bare twigs against the sky, masks under the balconies
that
I sing alway
About the Author
John Ashbery was born in 1927 in Rochester, New York, and grew up on a farm near Lake Ontario. He studied English at Harvard and at Columbia, and along with his friends Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch, he became a leading voice in what came to be called the New York School of poets. Ashbery’s poetry collection Some Trees was selected by W. H. Auden as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize in 1955—the first of over twenty-five critically admired works Ashbery has published in a career spanning more than six decades. His book Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award, and since then Ashbery has been the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a National Humanities Medal, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and a Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other honors.
For years, Ashbery taught creative writing at Brooklyn College and Bard College in New York, working with students and codirecting MFA programs while continuing to write and publish award-winning collections of poetry—all marked by his signature philosophical wit, ardent honesty, and polyphonic explorations of modern language. His most recent book of poems is Quick Question, published in 2012. He lives in New York.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publications, in which some of the poems in this book originally appeared: American Poetry Review: “Variant,” “The Couple in the Next Room,” “Lost and Found and Lost Again,” and “Saying It to Keep It From Happening.” Antaeus: “Crazy Weather” and “Birds-Eye View of the Tool and Die Co.” Chicago Review: “All Kinds of Caresses” and “The Thief of Poetry.” Denver Quarterly: “Unctuous Platitudes” and “On the Towpath.” Georgia Review: “Loving Mad Tom” and “Whether It Exists.” New York Review of Books: “Valentine,” “Houseboat Days,” “Street Musicians,” “The Gazing Grain,” “Wet Casements,” and “Friends.” The New Yorker: “Melodic Trains,” “Collective Dawns,” “The Lament upon the Waters,” “The Wrong Kind of Insurance.” Poetry: “The Ice-Cream Wars,” “Blue Sonata,” “Syringa,” and “Fantasia on ‘The Nut-Brown Maid’” Roof: “Two Deaths.” The Scotsman: “The Explanation.” Spectator: “And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name.” Sun: “And Others, Vaguer Presences.” Times Literary Supplement: “Business Personals” and “Daffy Duck in Hollywood.” Vanderbilt Poetry Review: “What Is Poetry.” Yale French Studies: “Drame Bourgeois.” Z: “The Other Tradition” and “Wooden Buildings.”
“The Serious Doll” was first published by the Kermani Press. “Pyrography” was commissioned by the U.S. Department of the Interior for its Bicentennial exhibition, “America 1976,” and first appeared in the exhibition catalog published by the Hereward Lester Cooke Foundation.
Copyright © 1975, 1976, 1977 by John Ashbery
Cover design by Mimi Bark
978-1-4804-5945-8
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