by John Ashbery
The distant treetops with their steeple (so
Innocent), the stair, the windows’ fixed flashing—
Pierced full of holes by the evil that is not evil,
The romance that is not mysterious, the life that is not life,
A present that is elsewhere.
And further in the small capitulations
Of the dance, you rub elbows with it,
Finger it. That day you did it
Was the day you had to stop, because the doing
Involved the whole fabric, there was no other way to appear.
You slid down on your knees
For those precious jewels of spring water
Planted on the moss, before they got soaked up
And you teetered on the edge of this
Calm street with its sidewalks, its traffic,
As though they are coming to get you.
But there was no one in the noon glare,
Only birds like secrets to find out about
And a home to get to, one of these days.
The light that was shadowed then
Was seen to be our lives,
Everything about us that love might wish to examine,
Then put away for a certain length of time, until
The whole is to be reviewed, and we turned
Toward each other, to each other.
The way we had come was all we could see
And it crept up on us, embarrassed
That there is so much to tell now, really now.
Figures in a Landscape
What added note, what responsibility
Do you bring? Inserted around us like birdcalls
With an insistent fall. But the body
Builds up a resistance. The signs
Are no longer construed as they could have been.
The yellow chevron sails against the blue block
Of the sky, and is off. It turns tail and disappears.
Moving through much tepid machinery,
It makes more sense as it goes along.
Father and the others will be there
In their wooden jewelry, under the trees,
Since it makes sense not to quarrel
About the hole. You will perhaps see us dancing
Whom no one could ever figure out until you settled
At our feet like bushes and in the new glare
Several of the old features returned.
Without that we’d shoot back into the hills.
Statuary
The prevailing winds lied in intent
The day she was given up.
The long cloth cawed from the cough cave:
First shallow groping outward, thirsty bites, more
Than heart can bestow.
You tell me I missed the most interesting part
But I think I found the most interesting part:
An unheralded departure by extinguished torchlight
Whose decorative patina
Is everything to the group—wind, fire, breathing, snores.
I was not there I was aware of Yogi Bear
There where I found a most interesting port
Crying wares to millennial crossings of voyagers
But this space is a checkerboard,
Whether it be land, sea or art
Trapped in the principle of the great beyond
Lacking only the expertise to
“Make a statement.”
Otherwise
I’m glad it didn’t offend me
Not astral rain nor the unsponsored irresponsible musings
Of the soul where it exists
To be fed and fussed over
Are really what this trial is about.
It is meant to be the beginning
Yet turns into anthems and bell ropes
Swaying from landlocked clouds
Otherwise into memories.
Which can’t stand still and the progress
Is permanent like the preordained bulk
Of the First National Bank
Like fish sauce, but agreeable.
Five Pedantic Pieces
An idea I had and talked about
Became the things I do.
The poem of these things takes them apart,
And I tremble. Sparse winter, less vulnerable
Than deflated summer, the nests of words.
Some of the tribes believe the spirit
Is immanent in a person’s nail parings.
They gather up their dead swiftly,
At sundown. And this will be
Some forgotten day three years ago:
Startling evidence of light after death.
Another person. The yellow-brick and masonry
Wall, deeper, duller all afternoon
And a voice waltzing, fabricating works
Of sentimental gadgetry—messes he’d cook up.
And the little hotel looked all right
And well lit, in the dark, on the flat
Beach behind the breakers, stiff, harmless.
And you are amazed that so much flimsy stuff
Stays erect, trapped in our mummery.
Flowering Death
Ahead, starting from the far north, it wanders.
Its radish-strong gasoline fumes have probably been
Locked into your sinuses while you were away.
You will have to deliver it.
The flowers exist on the edge of breath, loose,
Having been laid there.
One gives pause to the other,
Or there will be a symmetry about their movements
Through which each is also an individual.
It is their collective blankness, however,
That betrays the notion of a thing not to be destroyed.
In this, how many facts we have fallen through
And still the old façade glimmers there,
A mirage, but permanent. We must first trick the idea
Into being, then dismantle it,
Scattering the pieces on the wind,
So that the old joy, modest as cake, as wine and friendship,
Will stay with us at the last, backed by the night
Whose ruse gave it our final meaning.
Haunted Landscape
Something brought them here. It was an outcropping of peace
In the blurred afternoon slope on which so many picnickers
Had left no trace. The hikers then always passed through
And greeted you silently. And down in one corner
Where the sweet william grew and a few other cheap plants
The rhythm became strained, extenuated, as it petered out
Among pots and watering cans and a trowel. There were no
People now but everywhere signs of their recent audible passage.
She had preferred to sidle through the cane and he
To hoe the land in the hope that some day they would grow happy
Contemplating the result: so much fruitfulness. A legend.
He came now in the certainty of her braided greeting,
Sunlight and shadow, and a great sense of what had been cast off
Along the way, to arrive in this notch. Why were the insiders
Secretly amused at their putting up handbills at night?
By day hardly anyone came by and saw them.
They were thinking, too, that this was the right way to begin
A farm that would later have to be uprooted to make way
For the new plains and mountains that would follow after
To be extinguished in turn as the ocean takes over
Where the glacier leaves off and in the thundering of surf
And rock, something, some note or other, gets lost,
And we have this to look back on, not much, but a sign
Of the petty ordering of our days as it was created and led us
By the nose through itself, and now it has happened
And we have it to l
ook at, and have to look at it
For the good it now possesses which has shrunk from the
Outline surrounding it to a little heap or handful near the center.
Others call this old age or stupidity, and we, living
In that commodity, know how only it can enchant the dear soul
Building up dreams through the night that are cast down
At the end with a graceful roar, like chimes swaying out over
The phantom village. It is our best chance of passing
Unnoticed into the dream and all that the outside said about it,
Carrying all that back to the source of so much that was precious.
At one of the later performances you asked why they called it a “miracle,”
Since nothing ever happened. That, of course, was the miracle,
But you wanted to know why so much action took on so much life
And still managed to remain itself, aloof, smiling and courteous.
Is that the way life is supposed to happen? We’ll probably never know
Until its cover turns into us: the eglantine for duress
And long relativity, until it becomes a touch of red under the bridge
At fixed night, and the cries of the wind are viewed as happy, salient.
How could that picture come crashing off the wall when no one was in the room?
At least the glass isn’t broken. I like the way the stars
Are painted in this one, and those which are painted out.
The door is opening. A man you have never seen enters the room.
He tells you that it is time to go, but that you may stay,
If you wish. You reply that it is one and the same to you.
It was only later, after the house had materialized elsewhere,
That you remembered you forgot to ask him what form the change would take.
But it is probably better that way. Now time and the land are identical,
Linked forever.
My Erotic Double
He says he doesn’t feel like working today.
It’s just as well. Here in the shade
Behind the house, protected from street noises,
One can go over all kinds of old feeling,
Throw some away, keep others.
The wordplay
Between us gets very intense when there are
Fewer feelings around to confuse things.
Another go-round? No, but the last things
You always find to say are charming, and rescue me
Before the night does. We are afloat
On our dreams as on a barge made of ice,
Shot through with questions and fissures of starlight
That keep us awake, thinking about the dreams
As they are happening. Some occurrence. You said it.
I said it but I can hide it. But I choose not to.
Thank you. You are a very pleasant person.
Thank you. You are too.
I Might Have Seen It
The person who makes a long-distance phone call
Is talking into the open receiver at the other end
The mysterious discourse also emerges as pointed
In his ear there are no people in the room listening
As the curtain bells out majestically in front of the starlight
To whisper the words This has already happened
And the footfalls on the stair turn out to be real
Those of your neighbor I mean the one who moved away
The Hills and Shadows of a New Adventure
Even the most finicky would find
Some way to stand in the way.
He looked down at the ledge,
Grappling with more serious, better times.
A lady’s leg crossed his mind.
Far out at sea the gulls shifted like weights.
This freshness was only a chore. In other words
The screen of lights is always there, calling
A name of vowels and then there is silence,
A burnt-out moon, our old Franklin
Parked in the yard
Under the final shade.
If there was a way to separate these objects
We feel, from these lived eventualities
That torment our best intentions
With a vision of a man bent over his desk,
Writing, communicating with the pad
Which becomes dream velvet the next time,
A moonlit city in which minorities
Fluctuate, drawing out the cultural medium
As fine as floating threads of cobwebs
Around the one ambiguous space:
Its own discoverer and name,
Named after itself,
Which is its name, and all these go into cities
Like ships behind a sea wall.
You cannot know them
Yet they are a part of you, the cold reason part
You do know about.
You were not present at the beginning
But this is not so difficult to figure out:
Messengers crying your name
In the streets of all the principal cities.
Morning. An old tractor.
It seems strange that there is no name for these
And that the night passages now seem so clear
Where you thought were only telephone wires
And the birds of strange rented buildings
In a place close to the north yet not north
With a strong smell of burlap,
A place to wait for, not in.
Knocking Around
I really thought that drinking here would
Start a new chain, that the soft storms
Would abate, and the horror stories, the
Noises men make to frighten themselves,
Rest secure on the lip of a canyon as day
Died away, and they would still be there the next morning.
Nothing is very simple.
You must remember that certain things die out for awhile
So that they can be remembered with affection
Later on and become holy. Look at Art Deco
For instance or the “tulip mania” of Holland:
Both things we know about and recall
With a certain finesse as though they were responsible
For part of life. And we congratulate them.
Each day as the sun wends its way
Into your small living room and stays
You remember the accident of night as though it were a friend.
All that is forgotten now. There are no
Hard feelings, and it doesn’t matter that it will soon
Come again. You know what I mean. We are wrapped in
What seems like a positive, conscious choice, like a bird
In air. It doesn’t matter that the peonies are tipped in soot
Or that a man will come to station himself each night
Outside your house, and leave shortly before dawn,
That nobody answers when you pick up the phone.
You have all lived through lots of these things before
And know that life is like an ocean: sometimes the tide is out
And sometimes it’s in, but it’s always the same body of water
Even though it looks different, and
It makes the things on the shore look different.
They depend on each other like the snow and the snowplow.
It’s only after realizing this for a long time
That you can make a chain of events like days
That more and more rapidly come to punch their own number
Out of the calendar, draining it. By that time
Space will be a jar with no lid, and you can live
Any way you like out on those vague terraces,
Verandas, walkways—the forms of space combined with time
We are allowed, and we live them passionately,
&n
bsp; Fortunately, though we can never be described
And would make lousy characters in a novel.
Not Only / But Also
Having transferred the one to the other
And living on the plain of insistent self-knowledge
Just outside the great city, I see many
Who come and go, and being myself involved in distant places
Ask how they adjust to
The light that rains on the traveler’s back
And pushes out before him. It is always “the journey,”
And we are never sure if these are preparations
Or a welcome back to the old circle of stone posts
That was there before the first invention
And now seems a place of vines and muted shimmers
And sighing at noon
As opposed to
The terrain of stars, the robe
Of only that journey. You adjusted to all that
Over a long period of years. When we next set out
I had spent years in your company
And was now turning back, half amused, half afraid,
Having in any case left something important back home
Which I could not continue without,
An invention so simple I could never figure out
How they spent so many ages without discovering it.
I would have found it, altered it
To be my shape, probably in my own lifetime,
In a decade, in just a few years.
Train Rising Out of the Sea
It is written in the Book of Usable Minutes
That all things have their center in their dying,
That each is discrete and diaphanous and
Has pointed its prow away from the sand for the next trillion years.
After that we may be friends,
Recognizing in each other the precedents that make us truly social.
Do you hear the wind? It’s not dying,
It’s singing, weaving a song about the president saluting the trust,
The past in each of us, until so much memory becomes an institution,
Through sheer weight, the persistence of it, no,
Not the persistence: that makes it seem a deliberate act
Of duration, much too deliberate for this ingenuous being,
Like an era that refuses to come to an end or be born again.
We need more night for the sky, more blue for the daylight
That inundates our remarks before we can make them
