by John Ashbery
Admit impressions of traceries of leaves
And shallow birds among memories.
The climate seceded then,
The glad speculation about what clothes
They wore stacked like leaves,
Speckled behind the eye of what
Consumer, what listener?
And the praise is lascivious
To the onyx ear at evening
But not forwarded
Into the ring with the other shouting,
The desperate competitions willed
Until darkness, dripping toward death
By late morning.
She circles plainly away
From it in wider and wider loops,
And what have you to say? What account
To give? Of the season’s vast
Storehouse of agendas, bales
Of items for discussion dwindling
Down to a last seed on the stone doorstep?
If this was the season only of death
That licorice blast would not keep only
In its retelling the unfurled
Question-mark of the shaved future but redound
To us waiting here against the spike fence
In pleasant attitudes from which the waiting
Is forgotten like thorns in the memory
Of laced paths merging on
Extinct, ultimate slopes,
But trap us in the game of two flavors
(A rising shout some distance away,
The tabac alike in resisting
Terribilità
Yet basing it on us, all the same
A knowledge of its measure, its
Proportion, until the end is sought
Dryly, among stringent grasses).
To have sought it any more, mining
Its anfractuosities, is to bear witness,
The living getting trampled
Underfoot always the same way
And as surely one desiccated spike of
Sea-oats rises quizzically after the
Hordes have passed over, the film
Slips over the cogs
That brought us to this unearthly spot.
So death is really an appetite for time
That can see through the haze of blue
Smoke-rings to the turquoise ceiling.
She said this once and turned away
Knowing we wanted to hear it twice,
But knowing also as we knew that speculation
Raves and raves as on a mirror
To the outlandish accompaniment of its own death
That reads as life to the toilers
And potboys who make up these blond
Coils of citizenry which are life in the abstract.
What it was like to be mouthing those
Solemn abstractions that were crimson
And solid as beefsteak. One
Shouldn’t be surprised by
The smell of mignonette and the loss
As each stands still, and the softness
Of the land behind each one,
Where each one comes from.
Because it is the way of the personality of each
To blush and act confused, groping
For the wrong words so that the
Coup de théâtre
Will unfold all at once like shaken-out
Lightning and no one
Will have heard anything. The gray,
Fake Palladian club buildings will
Still stand the next moment, at their grim
Business: empty entablatures, oeils-de-boeuf,
Gun-metal laurels, the eye
Revolving slowly in the empty socket
That the bronze visor shades: there was
Never anything but this,
No footfalls on the mat-polished marble floor,
No bird-dropping, no fates, no sanctuary.
The sheet slowly rises to greet you.
The asters are reflected
Simultaneously in ruby drops of the wine
The morning after the great storm
That swept our sky away, leaving
A new muscle in its place: a relaxed, far-away
Tissue of scandal and dreams like noon smoke
Lingering above horizon roofs.
But what difference did any of it make
Woven on death’s loom as indeed
All of it was though divided into
Chapters each with its ornamental
Capital at the beginning, and its polished
Sequel? You knew
You were coming to the end by the way the other
Would be beginning again, so that nobody
Was ever lonesome, and the story never
Came to its dramatic conclusion, but
Merely leveled out like linen close up
In the mirror. So that the roundness
Was all around to be appreciated, yet somehow flat
As well, and could never be trusted
Even though the rushes slanted all one way
In the autumn wind, and the leaves
And branches tried to slant with them
In a poem of harmonious dejection, but it was
Only picture-making. Under
The intimate light of the lantern
One really felt rather than saw
The thin, terrifying edges between things
And their terrible cold breath.
And no one longed for the great generalities
These seemed to preclude. Each thought only
Of his private silence, and hungered
For the promised moment of rest.
II
I photographed all things,
All things as happening
As prelude, as prelude to the impatience
Of enormous summer nights opening
Out farther and farther, like the billowing
Of a parachute, with only that slit
Of starlight. The old, old
Wonderful story, and it’s all right
As far as it goes, but impatience
Is the true ether that surrounds us.
Without it everything would be asphalt.
Now that the things of autumn
Have been sequestered too in their chain
The other part of the year become
Visible
And the summer night is like a goldfish bowl
With everything in full view, yet only parts
Are what is actually seen, and these supply
The rest. It’s not like cheating
Since it is all there, but more like
Helping the truth along a little:
The artifice lets it become itself,
Nestling in truth. These are long days
And we need all the help we can get.
We are to become ashamed only much later,
Much later on, under the long bench.
And it is not like the old days
When we used to sing off-key
For hours in the rain-drenched schoolroom
On purpose. Here, whatever is forgotten
Or stored away is imbued with vitality.
Whatever is to come is too.
How can I explain?
No matter how raffish
The new clients moving slowly along,
Taking in the sights, placing bets,
There comes a time when the moment
Is full of, knows only itself.
Like a moment when a tree
Is seen to tower above everything else,
To know itself, and to know everything else
As well, but only in terms of itself
Without knowing or having a clear concept
Of itself. This is a moment
Of fast growing, of compounding myths
As fast as they can be thrown off,
Trampled under, forgotten. The moment
Not made of itself or any other
Substance w
e know of, reflecting
Only itself. Then there are two moments,
How can I explain?
It was as though this thing—
More creature than person—
Lumbered at me out of the storm,
Brandishing a half-demolished beach umbrella,
So that there might be merely this thing
And me to tell about it.
It was awful. And I too have no rest
From the storm that is always something
To worry about. Really. My unworthiness
Like a loose garment or cape of some sort
Constantly sliding off the shoulders,
Around the elbows ... I cannot keep it on,
Even as I am invisible in the eye
Of the storm, we two are blind,
And blind to the inaudible repercussions,
The strange woody aftertaste.
After that the wave came
And left no mark on the shore.
The waves advanced as the tide withdrew.
There was nothing for it but to
Retreat from the edge of the earth,
In that time, that climate expecting rain,
Behind some brackish business
On the margin intuiting cataclysms of light.
All that fall I wanted to be with you,
Tried to catch up to you in the streets
Of that time. Needless to say,
Although we were together a good part of the time
I never quite made it to the thunder.
The boy who cried “wolf” used to live there.
This place of islands and slow reefs,
Like petals of mercury, that fold up
Whenever that allusion is made.
It falls off the others like
Water off piled-up stones at the base
Of a waterfall, and the petals
Curl up, injured, into themselves.
Only the frozen emphasis
On a single thing that was out of sight
When the allusion was made, remains.
We all bought tickets to the allusion
And are disappointed, of course.
But what can you do? Events have
A way of snapping off like that, like
The glassblower’s striped candy canes
Of glass at a moment he knows is coming,
Is there, even. The old,
Wonderful story. Not yet ended.
You who approach me,
All grace and linearity,
With my new crayons I think I’ll
Do a series of box-sprays—stippled
Cobalt on the gold
Of a sun-pure afternoon
In October when things change over.
There is no longer time for a line
Or rather there are no lines in the time
Of ripeness that is past,
Yet still pausing on the ridge
Stealing into permanence.
It was all French horns
And oboes and purple vetch:
That was what it was all about, but
What it came to be came later
And other—a scene, a
Simple situation, something as
Basic as two people sitting in the sun
With no thought of the morrow, or of today,
As the whispers mingled in a choir outlining them
And we took a lesson away from this,
A lesson like a piece of cloth.
It’s going to be different in the future
But now the now is what matters,
Knowing itself old, and open to vengeance,
And, in short, up to nobody’s expectations
For it, as dank and empty
As an old Chevy parked under the trees
Amid dead leaves and dogshit, everybody’s
Idea of what was coming true for them
Which is now burning in lava-like letters
In the sky, a piece of good news
If you agree that good news is what
Is happening at this very instant.
The California sun turned its back on us
So we chose New England and the more vibrant
Violet light of tame tempests,
Dreams of sleeping watchdogs,
And the whole house was full of people
Having a good time, and though
No one offered you a drink and there were no
Clean glasses and the supper
Never appeared on the table, it was
Strangely rewarding anyway.
It gave one an idea of what they thought of one:
Even the ocean that came crashing almost
Into the back yard did not seem ill-disposed
And that was something. Presently
Out of this near-chaos an unearthly
Radiance stood like a person in the room,
The memory of the host, perhaps. And all
Fell silent, or stayed at their musings, silent
As before, and no one any longer
Offered words of advice or misgiving, but drank
The silence that had been silence before,
On this scant strip of slag,
Basking in the same light as before,
Inhabiting the same thought:
A shelf of breasts and underwear packaging
Rumored in the dark ages.
These people, you see,
Had to come to appear to thrive
And somewhat later sidestep the destiny
That pretended not to see them.
It was all necessary so that some source,
An origin of the present, might
In the scent of verbena and dreams of
Combat locked in the sky over the mid-ocean
Gradually give less and less of itself
And in so dying bequeath the manner
Of its being to the sidewalk shrubbery
And so enable it to become itself
Even though that self is only the sometimes-noticed
Backdrop for ourselves and all
We wondered whether we would become,
Pockmarked flecks of polluted matter
Infrequently visible in the hail of ventilated indifference
Or seconds of radiation, our own very special
Thing we had been trying to get our hands
On for so many years.
Honey, it’s all Greek to me, I—
(And just to make sure you get
It: the thought crossed my mind
That I would do well to take up my studies again,
I seemed to have become less averse to laughter
And less disinclined for certain small pleasures,
And I began quietly to reason with myself
About this matter, as I usually do about others,
So that I regretfully concluded
That I would soon again be the same man as before—)
Meaning: the same nausea when I heard cheerful talk,
The same grief, the same deep and prolonged meditation,
And almost the same frenzy and oppression.
Supposing that you are a wall
And can never contribute to nature anything
But the feeling of being alongside it,
A certain luxury, and now,
They come to you with the old matter
Of your solidity, that firmness,
That way you have of squaring off
The maps of distant hills, so that nature
Seems farther apart from itself because of you.
Is it this you have done?
And a certain grassy look, the color
Of old semiprecious stones, has to be
What’s coming out of you, for the two of you.
And the mechanical reverie is cut up by fits
Of blaring trumpets and alarms, in the night.
Forward then into the yellow villages.
Despite the
eerie setbacks
Of our subpolar ambience, we are
Living, we are dwelling on a network
Of insane desires handled frugally.
Passport in hand, we arrive in the morning
At the station, the dumb train
Vaults you along into forests of
Broccoli, or tracts of leathery
Tundra, one eye on the digital watch.
The tonal purity grows, and dissipates,
But meanwhile the plateau remains staunch,
It’s only the towers that dot it that tend
To look pierced by the sky
Or fade away absentmindedly, altogether.
The naked report arrived vividly
In the night.
Groaning for the latter day brought us
To this place, a trough of silent chatter
Between two notable waves. And we must arrange
These filaments of silence as an elephant trap
Over the grid of city conversations and background doings.
The quietude
Of the future to be built, beside which
Today’s valors and sighs must appear
As vanished suburbs beside some eighteenth-century
Metropolis, or stairs rolling down to a sea
Of urgent scrolls and torsades:
A Baltic commonplace riven by tremendous
Hairline fissures as deep as the heavens.
In other words, leave it alone.
That’s interesting. In my diary
I have noted down all kinds of exceptional
Things to go with the rest
As one who naps beside a chasm
Swollen with the hellish sound of wind
And torrents, and never chooses
To play back the tape. Waking
Refreshed if not alert, he steps forth
Into the centuries that grew like shadows
Under tall trees while he slept;
The days rub off like scales, the years
Like burrs or briars plucked
Patiently from the sleeve, and never sees
Or hears the havoc wrought by his passing,
Abysses that open up behind
His perilous, beribboned journey, the jalopy
Disappearing deep into vales
To re-emerge suddenly on heights, through
The tunnel of a giant sequoia. And always
An old-time mannerliness and courtesy informs
The itinerary, leaving us
Without much to go on.
Once it becomes fatality,
Of course,
The journey is at an end, and it is just beginning—
Innate—
A moody performance.
The critics hated it.
Now one borrows money from his friends,
In double time, the consequences
Blur the motives. The contours of the figures
Are curved and fat. He goes out among the trees,
Sees the lights in the valley far below.
Up here the air is black, ice-cold, of a
Terrifying purity, doubled over somehow.
