by John Ashbery
Where it is until the next time.
Like a summer job in a department store
It stays on and on,
Breaking up the moments, hiding
The kissing,
Taking whatever is there away from us.
Its temperature is darkness,
Its taste, the silent, bitter welcome
On the edge of the forest
When you were starting to reach home.
Also, too much is written
About it, as though each time
Were starting from zero toward an imaginary
Number. No one sees it’s
Just the evening news, mostly,
A translation into the light of day,
Or two fiddles scraping along
Out of kindness, you think, but
To whom? In short, any kind of tame
Manifestation against the straw
Of darkness and the darkening trees
Until the aftertaste claimed it.
Nothing here is like the
Wet, hot vigil
That loneliness erected:
There is nothing here that can be seen
The way that city could be seen,
Most precisely at night, perhaps
When thousands of tongues inspect it
And the outline of its state of mind
Tapers off hard and clear
Until the next time.
The noises in the bedroom dissolve slowly
And at last the thread holds
So that the lining adheres strictly
Or as a plumb line erected straight into the air
To stand for all vertical constructions
That chide and quietly amaze
The pale blue of the sky.
The shops here don’t sell anything
One would want to buy.
It’s even hard to tell exactly what
They’re selling—in one, you might
Find a pile of ventilators next
To a lot of cuckoo-clock parts,
Plus used government documents and stacks
Of cans of brine shrimp, and an
Extremely elegant saleslady, in
Printed chiffon, seeming to be from a different
World entirely. But that’s—que voulez-vous?—
Par for the course, I guess. You
Pick up certain things here, where
You need them, and
Do without the others for the moment,
Essential though they may be.
Every collection is as notable for its gaps
As for what’s there. The wisest among us
Collect gaps, knowing it’s the only way
To realize a more complete collection
Than one’s neighbor’s. It’s also cheaper
And easier to show off to advantage.
At night rain whips the collection,
The plunge, the surge of the tide
Drowns the memory of it. Only a dark field remains
But with the return of morning, the same
Familiar sticks and pieces poke
Their extremities out of the dewy mound of straw.
The collection, at least for some people,
Is still there. And it matters
To them, and to tax collectors
And taxation buffs, because
Now none of it will get lost
Any more than it already has. A
Garage can contain it.
All
Evening I have waited for your call.
The early period was never like this.
Even birds are happier than this.
You have
No right to take something out of life
And then put it back, knowingly, beside
Its double, from whom
The original tensions unwittingly came.
The collection matures.
Amateurs flock to it, to get a look at it.
And some day the idea
Will have been removed, extracted,
From the flurry of particulars
From numbered exhibits,
And the collected will have no end.
A few always stay behind mechanically
On a glimpsed piece of scaffolding.
There are many of us to choose from:
Blowhards, barnacles, old fogeys
Rushing up from under the earth
Into the sun!
It doesn’t matter that the fruit is greenish,
Or that the ill-defined sidewalks seem to lead nowhere
As long as the clock is stowed in somebody’s luggage.
The round smile of celebration
Is always there,
Is part of the permanent scenery
Of this age’s accumulation
And seeps, or drifts, only a little.
My dear yesterday,
You were ugly and full of promise
And today the delta is forming:
The water, or is it sandbars, stretching away
Almost too far for them to mean to each other
What they still mean to us.
Another thing they can do to you
Is also celebration, but of another kind:
The dance that is a brown study
Under the skylight,
The music of eternal moping
As far as it goes, since eternity
Is an eye, and some things elude the eye:
Polite gestures, timid farewells
Alongside a flooded creek in April,
The false sparkle, the finish, the edge.
These permutate, combine
In a gentle ellipse of spoken vagaries
That pester nobody, and yet
How few invitations are received!
They say they’re having trouble with the mails
And so many people have moved as
We become an increasingly mobile populace
In the deep shade of a quiet trailer park
Where nobody minds waiting
For one to finish examining the elaborate
Mechanical toys of the last century
Or playing warped, scratched 78 records
Of the great coloraturas of the past.
One is always free to sink into history
Up to the waist, and the mountains are
Now so breathtakingly close to the city
That it’s like taking a vacation
Just to stay home and look at them.
That’s all one can do.
Inhaling the while the extremely cold
Fresh cement smell which you must pass
On your way to school.
For all those with erysipelas
And the wrinkles on the forehead
And the cheeks that come from within, like reverse scars
For all those wearing old clothes
With the dormant look of expectation about them
For the women ironing
And who cut into lengths of white cloth
The glass stopper has been removed
We can breathe! The ocean has been pulled away.
I was over to the dog show the other day and
Noticed a nice-looking girl gazing around
As if puzzled. I went over to her and said:
“Pardon me, but can’t you find the kennel
You wish?
If not, I shall be glad to assist you.”
“Oh, thank you!” she replied. “Would you
Mind showing me where they are exhibiting the ocean greyhounds?”
I came out here originally I
Came to this flat place
On the side away from the sun,
I think my stain must be cauterized.
I have touched no drink
For an elevenmonth, yet my head
Seems stuck in my collar. I have
No friends because I move too rapidly
From place to place, only an assistant.
>
The time is always false dawn
In Indian Summer. Faded markings on
The floor where I walk could have
Been produced by me, or at best
Some outside agency. I have no reason
To rejoice in my mummy condition, yet
Am fairly happy from day to day
Like a steeple rejoicing in the sun
It is the last to shake hands with.
I wear my weather
With a good-natured air of secrecy,
And have no trouble finding my way home
Once the fun is done. I can sleep.
I can stand up. The buzzing in the vault
Of the temple disturbs me only insofar
As I consult my pocket watch and replace it
Affably in my breast-pocket. But
There is a time and a light
Which do not approach, which leave me
In the years.
Don’t flog it. Remember how
Insane your other undertakings seemed to you,
How hopeless your desires, how tortured
The ambience, or riddled
With the stuff of hazard.
The orgy
Bubbles away, the vapors weep their burthen to the ground.
But in that hotel
The night is ongoing, the rain
Continues. Too much of a philosophy
Is about all it can stand, and we wait
For the men and ducks to go away, and still
Most everything stays with us,
Rooted in thoughtful soil.
The elephant’s-foot umbrella stand
That used to be over there, why,
Somebody must have changed it, or the last
Catastrophe fished it up out of the depths
Beyond heaven, or it is here,
For us to see, yet absent for a while.
Or perhaps someone merely heard of it
Or it got written down the wrong way
In a page of an account book that got mailed
In a letter by mistake. Perhaps the dust,
That emptiness on the outside of air, ate it.
Or in the bin of odd-size and discontinued
Artifacts it holds its own while seen
Only partially because the surrounding
Knobs and hues rob it of a full presence.
Or a photograph was taken, after which
It could be destroyed, and now
The photograph and the negative are lost
Up ahead in one of the strands
Where one shall encounter this and all the
Other deviating forms of momentary life
In a contradiction which shall make its point.
I like to imagine though
That nothing so awkward as the stand ever
Existed. It must have been
The trunk of an old apple tree
And bees hollowed it out to make honey,
Itself now gone, a remnant
Of a memory, a gesture time made
To no one in particular, to itself
Or not even to itself, a tic,
A twinge long invisible now
On the low-pressure area
On the weather map. A tremor
Far removed from the individual man
And his daily wants, a number
To be looked up in a book, or the catalogue number
Of that book, or both,
The number in the book and the catalogue number
In white guano on the brilliant cranberry binding,
Concerns galore
Under both headings, the identical twin numbers.
Ours, actually, is an “age on ages telling,”
Once it has become finality. Afterwards,
It drifts like a stalagmite, advancing
Pea-brained arguments an inch forward.
Of course all this has to go on
Parallel to the hoping, so as to display
The ancestral linkage, and, more importantly, to drown out
Any rumors of competing loyalties.
It is merely a question of avoiding the shadow
And the starched patch of light,
At the same time deferring to no sun,
No shore. No half-naked limit,
And, in the orange light that the sun succeeds nevertheless
In shedding all over this terrestrial ball, to avert
One’s gaze no longer and no less time than is intended
By the illuminating party to be your account
Of yourself, here on earth and for all time.
A grand army of fatality succeeding
One after the other like a phylloxera
Never succeeded in erasing intimate
Knowledge of how long that was supposed to be
Despite ferocious efforts from age to age the same
From the minds of those men in which it had been planted
Originally, and who continued to keep up
With the changing time and modes while retaining
With no effort at all,
As though all were elegy and toccata
(Which happens to be the case),
The guidelines. Once given
They can be forgotten in the sad joy of life,
Reverence for which is almost incumbent
On each contestant, and no one, including them,
Will ever be wider for it. Yet
Thereby hangs a tale, of starving musicians,
Strolling players, grasshopper and the ant
Whose contemptible fireside contrasts so untellingly
With the barren outdoors. Just to play an instrument,
It seems, is to have to come round one
Day to the impossibility of making a living on it,
To being forced to prostitute oneself, innocently,
For the greater pleasure which is as the damage
Succeeding on the small first pleasure.
And there’s no way out, unless
The sound of harps is sufficient distraction
Against the thunder of the fray “for which
Gog and Magog are said to be continually preparing,
Or loss of memory (which cannot, by definition,
Take place) render one oblivious to the traffic
And all it implies. That loss of memory
Which is itself a music,
A kind of music.
And meanwhile, growing older like leaves that lean back
Against the trees, is an accomplishment
Without comfort.
Back home from the beauty contest
And its attendant squalors, she doesn’t feel
Like much. The world
Is vaguer and less pejorative, a time
Of stressful headache but also
Of architectonic inklings and inspiration:
Agony for a day, and then the refreshing dream
Bubbles up like an artesian well in all its
Wealth of accurately observed detail,
Its truth of being, on the surface
But striking long, pointed roots into the dull earth
Behind the mask. Yet like a pain
That went away, its immanence
Is very much an ongoing thing, its present
Departed in the greater interest of the whole.
A coronet of dark red jewels
Like winter berries was slowly lowered
Onto the snow-white curls, and the dream became
A person, a beautiful princess unable to stand
Or sit. And the older guests remembered
How none of it had been predicted, though the mystery word,
“Magic,” had been imagined
Many years before. How
Do we live from the beginning of the tale
To its inevitable, momentary end, where all
Its pocket’s treasures are summarily emptied,
On the mirroring tabletop? And w
ait
For someone to whisper the word that restores them
To their velvet hummock, sets all right again?
Only the cartoon animals know
How hard it was to get inside the frame, and then
To make a noise, or eventually to place
An inky paw-print on the wide, blinding white
Damask desert as the company was leaving
In twos and threes. Someone
Projects a shriek of recognition far up, into the civilized
But dim world of the farthest chandelier.
A commercial airliner streaked by. Once again
The prize will not be awarded.
The distant plains match up with
The pictures of them on these transparent walls,
And that is all. No children
To relieve the tensions of the adult business,
No new funny animals, only the vocal abstractions
Of the solemn, imaginary world of transportation
And commerce. No one
Laughs at the brilliant errors any more.
Yet we who came to know them,
Castaways of middle life, somehow
Grew aware through the layers of numbing comfort,
The eiderdown of materialism and space, how much meaning
Was there languishing at the roots, and how
To take some of it home before it melts (as all
Will, dreams and mica-sparkling sidewalks, clouds
And office buildings, the conversation
And the trance, until
A day when they can do no more, and the mass
Of the scenery wanders partially
Over the defunct terrain of broken fences
And windows stuffed with rags) while the ballad
Still rings in the seller’s ear.
In the beginning of speech the question
Of frontiers is taken up again.
And the trees and buildings are porous
And the dome of heaven.
The talk leads nowhere but is
Inside its space.
It is contracting, it is observed ...
Breath we wanted, to build and lie down
In slumber at night, under the tattered shade
Of the trees, open to the rain, rustling of night.
And the wet, doggy smell,
The pealing of church bells interspersed with thunder
And lightning, the distress
And tiny triumphs of the field.
Everything is a shaft
Sunk far too deep into the body, opening landscapes,
New people, mingling in new conversations,
Yet distant, as the back of one’s head is distant.
It all seems like 2½ years ago
To the impatient sun trapped in the attic
When all it wants is to be able to write about mathematics and the word,
For although a few wind-chime notes filter down
From heaven in the small hours, one cannot help
But note the frequent fanfare of hoofbeats
In the wet, empty street.
