by John Ashbery
I wanted to do something,
Commemorate something,
Not “never” or that day coming up.
So I offer you everything
You may ever want, not
Knowing how I’ll pay the bills, just
Keeping to the memory of it like larkspur
Or a bird’s head I once saw in a forest at dusk.
Lots of them are coming to prepare you
For this, and if I can’t have you
I’ll figure out some way out of this
Until the hour tolls its distinction
Amid great bravery and truth
Where men are seen running in and around from all over
And the rendition of great sonatas
May then be seen to give back some fitful,
Momentary spark of “the” truth
As cedars blacken against the fence and the sky
Just before slipping through the buttonhole of truth—
The commonplace, casual occurrence.
An honest killer would have caught you
And told you that way, and gone away.
But the basin of remorse is so vast
No drop ever increases it, and telling
Only makes it reverberate
Inward upon itself, toward the center that is not there.
And whether you search for nightingales
Or distress signals on the earth’s clay lid, all
Is much the same: your face at morning
And your blue-plaid face at evening with no
Expression are nevertheless the same
Until the code is ventilated, and we who have
Come down with you, to the same root or comma,
Are new now, but with no difference.
He would cook up these goulashes
Make everything shipshape
And then disappear, like Hamlet, in a blizzard
Of speculation that comes to occupy
The forefront for a time, until
Nothing but the forefront exists, like a forehead
Of the times, speechless, drunk, imagined
In all its five shapes, and never in one state
Of repose, though always disclosed
And disclosing, keeping itself like a chance
In the dark, living wholly in a dream
Sweet reality discovers.
I wander through each dirty street
Knowing how painted rooms are bonny,
Remembering feather beds are soft, and Jack,
Eating rotten cheese. As the babble
Of apes in an orchard are the slogans
That solicit us like pennants in the sky:
Fools rush into my head, and so I write.
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records
From the interstices of my desirings
And imaginings, and find the whiteness
That was there. Already the colors of sleep
Are fading, a blankness
Is taking shape, and its magnificent outline
Washes true like the sound of a French horn,
And then somehow, sqwunched or
Scrunched down in the corner, in the folds
It collects itself, again, and all the differences
Are differences among rainbows, or adhesions
In the dance, that dissolve and strengthen
As it reaches its pitch. Again, ambition is seen
As no idle thing. Reading the papers
We are inflamed to emulate it, even as
There seems nothing wrong with it, and finally
Vote for it. Impetuously
We travel on, life seems full of promise,
And ambition is so recent as to be almost
Stronger than living, and makes its own
Definitions and pays for them. Surely
Life is meant to be this way, solemn
And joyful as an autumn wood rent by the hunters’
Horns and their dogs, unmixed with pleasure,
Turned inside out, violating
The very name of intimacy, but assured
Of an easy victory. Time was when it seemed
Too rich, too filling, but now the lean
Bones of the November wind are seen as dainty,
And just sufficient,
Emblems of the famished year.
O sun, God’s creation,
Shine hot for one hour, confounding my enemies
Or else make them like me. I want to write
Poems that are as inexact as mathematics. I have been
Sitting making mudpies, in the sparkling sunlight,
And the difficulty of giving them away
Doesn’t matter so long as I want you
To enjoy them. Enjoy these! You are busy, I know,
But could find time for this. Some day
People will remember them—this always happens—
And you’ll be caught with your pants down.
Besides, how many streams can you rake
With your copper rake, without counting;
How much pouring fog chase away, larks
And ploughmen delight? In the occupied countries
You are raised to the statute of a god, no one
Questions your work, its validity, all
Are eager only to support it, to give of themselves
So as to push your crowning effort over the top:
Never
Had any such a plebiscite, but you must earn it
Even so, prepare, purify yourself to be worthy of it
Although no one will notice. Then, when you
Are setting, in a blaze of glory, you’ll find
You have already written about this, about all
That’s already happened, and everything that could be
In the future, and won’t mind
About disappearing behind yon crag
Which already is grown silent, erect
With waiting, tense and eager as a bridegroom
For you to fall alongside its spine:
“The protector
Came from the tussock, the son rose up from the bottom.”
I have heard that in spring the mountains change
And seldom pay any mind to the sun (who continues,
Nonetheless, to do good deeds, bringing
Cowslips and other small plants out of the mould, changing
The barren shale to faerie, coaxing
Mica glints out of the flat, unappreciative sidewalks,
Turning everything around but making it
Delightful), occupied as they are
With furthering their own desires, spreading
Their dominion over the flat, quiet land around them.
But no one is punished for inattention any more:
It seems, in fact, to further the enjoyable
Side of the world’s activities. What seemed
Reckless, incoherent, even filthy at times
Is now the shortest distance; everything gets done
And, more important, ought to be done
This way, and only in this way,
For happiness to sustain, and fish to remain
In the depths, not elbowing the birds of the skies;
For it all to come right and not be noticed
Until just after it has slipped by, for the noble
And wonderful thing it is, so that the other
Visions may arise and occupy the same space.
Before long they too
Turn up in your mind.
You wonder what the original uses
Of famine were, after
We saw the film about it.
The brine shrimp were brought
And the fairy pudding placed next to them.
It’s good though—
It has meat on it.
We fucked too long,
Though, you see.
Now it’s too late to stay home
Or go anywhere except to that film
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We’ve both seen a dozen or more times.
Of course it’s good—that’s why
We saw it so often—
But after a while one feels one has lived it
And wants to get on with other living experiences.
Yet we keep returning to it—
It is good, after all, and we know the plot
And the characters by now, which makes it
Ours in a way that living our own lives
Never does. We know ourselves
And each other only too well; on the other
Hand the action is always new, though plotless,
The same. Toes are again pointed
Down a sidewalk, spring
Is in the air and the word “brothel” floats
Like a ribbon in the sunset, upsetting
The teen balance that was never anything
But a continuing collapse, that brought
Music and minor pleasures, and some
Nourishment, but always rolled back the conditions
To that flat, narrow time before the beginning,
Kind of a sample of the horizon
Before there was any place for it
And now that it exists it seems
Almost tame, or not as ripe
As we always imagined it would be.
In the sea of the farm
The dream of hay whirls us toward
Horizons like those only
Imagined, with no space, no groove
Between the sky and the earth, metallic,
Unfleshed, as though, as children,
Each of us might say how good
He or she is, and afterwards it is forgotten,
The thought, the very words.
But there are times when darkness
Hides this not very real horizon, and it turns
Steadfast for us. Sprays
Of trees are imagined there, and they endure
For a while once daylight has come,
The stubborn, sticky mixture of daylight.
If all the retinues of all
The archdukes stretched away into a powdery
Infinity, and you stood
On the top step but one, waiting to advance
Your argument into the aura, and time suddenly
At that moment seemed to sag, and the staircase
Became a giant hammock littered with dead leaves
And ants, and the horizon of the universe
Raised it up into something bald and filled
With unexpressed and inexpressible menace,
No word of which would ever
Attest to the configuration of desires
That had gone into its construction, dark now,
Absent-minded flowers, reticent birds, and much
Else that is scarcely present, needing
No avenue, no way to be born,
Who would greet you? Which might be
What you want to tell me: open the door.
Your hopes and fears, ambitions, inspirations
Are a closed book to me. And your
Uneasy acceptance of what doesn’t really matter,
Like a makeshift latrine, is, well,
Changed, back into remoteness by your verbs
Like winking dragonflies that officiate
So far down near the bottom of “caring”
As to seem interlopers, themselves
Displaced by later arrivals
That fell off the others, are part
And parcel, but that merely, of
The old, old wonderful story:
Grace and linearity
That take us up and bathe us, changing
The dirty colors of the little zephyrs
Into the next best thing: short gaffer,
Very short roses.
It goes without saying that I can’t,
“For the life of me,” figure out why we were both
Here. You are again listening to Haydn quartets,
Following them with the score. Afterwards
I wander all over you. Anyway that is the
Way I want you, the way things are
Going to be increasingly.
“Now to my tragic business.”
The moon, in a coma, listens nevertheless
To all that is said. Any word we
May have ever uttered gets recorded and
Catalogued, and anybody can go and look them up.
The storms don’t matter; even when the wind
Is about to demolish the roof, and the sea
Is banging on the front door, our words,
Even whispers, even unuttered thoughts are
Channeled into this cesspool of oral history.
You may be wondering about what comes next.
Never change when love has found its home.
Compliments of “a friend.”
But not in our day. It sits
Open and limited like the yard.
Yet there are silent beginnings of beginnings,
Nothing but prayers, though it seems
That we can now feel with our minds
Which is someplace between prayers
And the answer to prayers.
In all these
Accessories of going down into day, though polished
And bristling, the telling of the way
Still fails to appear. Stopping everyone
Along the way for news of a long list
Of people, the field of folk
Is full of people in gentle raiment
Of the sun woven with the moon, and smiles
Half hilarious and half tragic, so that they
Seem specters of some cosmic romance
Beyond comedy and tragedy, and their love pours
Over the dikes and barriers that are no more
Now that the flood has occurred
And stopped, a broad and quiet ocean
Woven of the sun and wind and true
Kisses that are heartier than love.
Kind words are like apples of gold
And pitchers of silver.
I thought I thought I thought
In vain
At last I thought with my name.
Remember me now
Remember me ever
And think of the fun
We had together.
A friend.
I will tell you lovers, it is the little boy or sire
That has a present smell or word
For all their meat.
A little boy was running away
To be seen no more, who is now seen
As before, in the abstract and the particular,
The flesh and the appearance of flesh,
Who is not unlike the little boy
Of love, with his mama
The lady of love, who arranged all this
And who is good beyond the shadows
Of evil and corruption others throw
Into our corner but we are always beside them.
Some think him mean-tempered and gruff
But actually his is an occasion for all occasions
And one can get by calling anything love
As long as it’s locked up in the Finis
Of the end, and still come out ahead.
(This is probably the fourth most important kind of love
But as long as lovers still look at the moon
In June, weaving fingers under the moon
We cannot know what happens here,
Whether or not we should go away.)
But I’m against all forms of physical
Sexual activity—against billy goats, too,
Never could stand ’em. Which is why
It’s difficult to get up in public and proclaim
About my cherished sorrow departing,
My appetite coming back, since all lovers
Are shadows projected from behind on the screen
Of my collective unconscious, eidolons
That won’t say yes or no, but keep prodding
The ground for the treasure buried there.
One or two a year is all right
But more than that releases the shadow
Of throngs of passersby, of the correct object
And the precise moment in the sea-level street.
So later we come to abide
By the state as we remember it
And in dreams overhear it
And all our richness of invention
Is as physic to the evil of the surround
Which can’t exist until we go after it,
Prove it by default.
Therefore I can’t advance too much
Toward the packed, glittering crowd:
It dematerializes too soon and my oblivion
Is the cost of the precise definition there
Besides which no one would ever want to see it
In that much detail (warts and all)
Knowing he would have to come out that way
Himself one day, and turn his back on all
He had with such difficulty become,
A pejorative lover, alone and palely
Loitering, having forgotten what the object
Of his affection was, with only the Pavlovian
Reflex of loving left to try to remind him
What it was all like one day, how it could have
Been. And as we realize this, they
Grow paler but more fixed, more sovereign
For this day and this hour, are what
Has been bearing down all along, the sleep
We have tried without success to ward off
All day, until the trap
Of night caves in under us and we emerge
Pellucid and dry-eyed as the others, beings made of
Love and time, who are to each other
What each is to himself.
I cry in the daytime,
And in the night season, and am not silent.
But what shall clean me within?
The way to nothing
Is the way to all things. The thoroughfare
That kept me inside
Is blocked with thurifers
That would lead to a different kind of life.
Yet all behaviors
Are equal in the eyes of a jade leaf
Prodded into history
But with a sense of itself and of society
Unequal to history.
History is a forest
In which a separate, positioned leaf
Could not occur
Leading to storms as multitudinous and varied
As the drops in a single storm
That flowers by the roadside
In winter, as white if taken this way
As an object which the mind can never
Control, leading to frosted silence
And cold unregard.
It is a landmark in a chain of landmarks,
Never to be harvested.
The atrocious accident, as ascribed
In columns of print, refreshes,
