by John Ashbery
Taking away a little bit of us each time
To be deposited elsewhere
In the place of our involvement
With the core that brought excessive flowering this year
Of enormous sunsets and big breezes
That left you feeling too simple
Like an island just off the shore, one of many, that no one
Notices, though it has a certain function, though an abstract one
Built to prevent you from being towed to shore.
Late Echo
Alone with our madness and favorite flower
We see that there really is nothing left to write about.
Or rather, it is necessary to write about the same old things
In the same way, repeating the same things over and over
For love to continue and be gradually different.
Beehives and ants have to be reexamined eternally
And the color of the day put in
Hundreds of times and varied from summer to winter
For it to get slowed down to the pace of an authentic
Saraband and huddle there, alive and resting.
Only then can the chronic inattention
Of our lives drape itself around us, conciliatory
And with one eye on those long tan plush shadows
That speak so deeply into our unprepared knowledge
Of ourselves, the talking engines of our day.
And I’d Love You To Be in It
Playing alone, I found the wall.
One side was gray, the other an indelible gray.
The two sides were separated by a third,
Or spirit wall, a coarser gray. The wall
Was chipped and tarnished in places,
Polished in places.
I wanted to put it behind me
By walking beside it until it ended.
This was never done. Meanwhile
I stayed near the wall, touching the two ends.
With all of my power of living
I am forced to lie on the floor.
To have reached the cleansing end of the journey,
Appearances put off forever, in my new life
There is still no freedom, but excitement
Turns in our throats like woodsmoke.
In what skyscraper or hut
I’ll finish? Today there are tendrils
Coming through the slats, and milky, yellowy grapes,
A mild game to divert the doorperson
And we are swiftly inside, the resurrection finished.
Tapestry
It is difficult to separate the tapestry
From the room or loom which takes precedence over it.
For it must always be frontal and yet to one side.
It insists on this picture of “history”
In the making, because there is no way out of the punishment
It proposes: sight blinded by sunlight.
The seeing taken in with what is seen
In an explosion of sudden awareness of its formal splendor.
The eyesight, seen as inner,
Registers over the impact of itself
Receiving phenomena, and in so doing
Draws an outline, or a blueprint,
Of what was just there: dead on the line.
If it has the form of a blanket, that is because
We are eager, all the same, to be wound in it:
This must be the good of not experiencing it.
But in some other life, which the blanket depicts anyway,
The citizens hold sweet commerce with one another
And pinch the fruit unpestered, as they will,
As words go crying after themselves, leaving the dream
Upended in a puddle somewhere
As though “dead” were just another adjective.
The Preludes
The difficulty with that is
I no longer have any metaphysical reasons
For doing the things I do.
Night formulates, the rest is up to the scribes and the eunuchs.
The reasons though were not all that far away,
In the ultramarine well under the horizon,
And they were—why not admit it?—real,
If not all that urgent.
And night too was real. You could step up
Into the little balloon carriage and be conducted
To the core of bland festival light.
And you mustn’t forget you can sleep there.
Over near somewhere else there is the problem
Of the difficulty. They weave together like dancers
And no one knows anything about the problem any more
Only the problem, like the outline
Of a housewife closing her door in the face of a traveling salesman
Throbs on the air for some time after.
Perhaps for a long time after that.
O we are all ushered in—
Into the presence that explains.
A Box and Its Contents
Even better than summer, but I no longer
Aim a poem at you, center of the forest at night,
One shoe off and one shoe on, half-nubile, old.
The excited ashes of your tale, always telling, more telling
Until the day we get it right,
A day of thoughtful joy. You said if it’s all right
To do it then there will be animals sleeping under the trees anyway.
You come out of love. But are. The treasure they
Were firing at was always yours anyway, you meant
To stand for it. Now there is no way down. But we
Children of that particular time, we always get back down.
You see, only some of the others were crying
And how your broad smile paints in the wilderness
A scene of happiness, with balloons and cars.
It was always yours to dig into, and you can’t, loving us.
The Cathedral Is
Slated for demolition.
I Had Thought Things Were Going Along Well
But I was mistaken.
Out Over the Bay the Rattle of Firecrackers
And in the adjacent waters, calm.
We Were on the Terrace Drinking Gin and Tonics
When the squall hit.
Fallen Tree
We do not have it, and they
Who have it are plunged in confusion:
It is so easy not to have it, the gold coin, we know
The contour of having it, a pocket
Around space that is an endless library
Where each book follows in a divinely ordered procession,
Like the rays of the sun.
Yet it was the pageant that you never wanted
But which you need now to make sense of the strengthening
Of the mounting days that begin to form a vault
Above this ancient red stage.
The days proceed.
Each is good in his role,
Very clever, in fact. But it is up to you
To make sense of what each has done.
Otherwise, in the rain-washed fiasco—
Twilight? A coming triumph? Or some other
Diversion you haven’t yet learned to recognize?—
We shall never recognize our true reflections,
Speaking to them as strangers, scolding,
Asking the time of day.
And the love that has happened for us
Will not know us
Unless you climb to a median kingdom
Of no climate
Where day and night exist only for themselves
And the future is our table and chairs.
The Picnic Grounds
Let the music tell it:
It came here, was around for a little while,
And left, like the campers,
Leaving fire-blackened brick, wrappers of things
And especially monster mood
and emptiness
Of those who were here and are gone.
A complex, but optional, experience.
Will the landscape mean anything new now?
But even if it doesn’t, the charge
Is up ahead somewhere, in the near future,
Squashing even the allegory of the grass
Into the mould of its aura, a lush patina.
So we, with all our high-minded notions
Of the self and the eventually winged purpose
Of that self, are now meaning
The raw material of the days and the ways that came over.
The shadow has been indefinitely postponed.
And the shape it takes in the process
Of definition of the evolving
Delta of shapes is too far, far in the milky limpid
Future of things. Too far to care, yet
There are those who do care for that
Kind of outline, distant, yes, but warm,
Full of the traceable meaning that never
Gets adopted. Well, isn’t that truth?
A Sparkler
The simple things I notice:
That they were coming at us, were at us, and were us
In this night like rotten mayonnaise I am afraid of
(It is helping me out) and steady boys
I want no one to latch onto
This time it has a special snap
And how it curved outward that time was more elaborate
But in the end got fuzzier
And at the same time more deducible
An illuminated word entered its crucible
But just once come back see it the way
I now see it
Sit fooling with your hair
Looking at me out of the corner of your eye
I’m so sorry
For what we haven’t done in the time we’ve known each other.
Then it’s back to school
Again yes the sales are on.
What do you need? We’ll try ...
Or is it all just a symbol of bad taste,
Of a bad taste in the mouth? I tried,
Not hard but pretty regular. But the pitch was
Elsewhere, parallel. The habitués would have
Had it, entertained it anyway,
But I was in disgrace. I lived in disgrace.
I was no one on that lawn.
But, lasting by lasting,
And by no other moment, we have come down
At last to where the plumbing is.
We had hoped for a dialogue.
But they’re rusty.
Then is it too late for me?
The wide angle that seeks to contain
Everything, as a sea, is an eye.
What is beheld is whatever lives,
Is wildly unappetizing and inappropriate,
And sits, and fits us.
The Wine
It keeps a large supply of personal pronouns
On hand. They awaken to see
Themselves being used as it grows up,
Confused, in a rush of fluidity.
Once men came back here to rot.
Now the salt banners only interrupt the sky—
Black crystals, quartzite. The balm of not
Knowing living filters to the bottom of each eye.
The telephone was involved in it. And bored
Glances, boring questions about the hem no
One wanted to look at, or would admit having seen.
These things came after it was a place to go.
Yet nothing was its essence. The core
Remained as elusive as ever. Until the day you
Fitted the unlikely halves together, and they clicked.
So its wholeness was an order. But it had seemed not to
Be part of the original blueprint, the way
It had appeared in intermittent dreams, stretching
Over several nights, like that. But that was okay,
Providing the noise factor didn’t suddenly loom
Too large, as was precisely happening just now.
Where have I seen that face before? And I see
Just what it means to itself, and how it came
Down to me. And so, in like manner, it came to be.
A Love Poem
And they have to get it right. We just need
A little happiness, and when the clever things
Are taken up (O has the mouth shaped that letter?
What do we have bearing down on it?) as the last thin curve
(“Positively the last,” they say) before the dark:
(The sky is pure and faint, the pavement still wet) and
The dripping is in the walls, within sleep
Itself. I mean there is no escape
From me, from it. The night is itself sleep
And what goes on in it, the naming of the wind,
Our notes to each other, always repeated, always the same.
There’s No Difference
In pendent tomes the unalterable recipe
Is decoded. Then, a space,
And another space. I was consulting
The surface of the wand
While you in white painter’s pants adored
A sunflower, hoping it would shit across the nation.
The explosion taught us to read again.
Do not remember why everything is unsavory
That in the night a pineapple came
For this poster is nominally a conjecture.
Distant Relatives
Six o’clock. The fast fragrance
Is clawing past me, frantic to be let out,
Not competent to stand trial.
Like trees on a golf course
These hours propose themselves, one by one,
And each comes to terms with roundness.
The bobbed heads bob. The silence
For once is melony, sweet as the light
Off parked cars.
I don’t need one of the hand-held jobs,
A heavy machine will do. And I must put across
Right now my idea of what it will do for me, before
It too founders in the tolling of leaves
(If all the tongues of all the bells
In this city fluttered silently)
As in that movie we saw where Mouloudji ...
What will he do with it?
1. I don’t get it.
2. It may not be worth it.
However the distances, it so happens, come to seem
Like partitions, both near and far:
Near, starting where my shoe is, and far
Ahead in the perspective, but connected
As the hours are connected to minutes
And I still feel the absence of you
As a thing that is both negative and positive
Like the broken mould of a lost
Statue
As the din becomes an uproar.
Histoire Universelle
As though founded by some weird religious sect
It is a paper disk, partially lit up from behind
With testaments to its cragginess, many of them
Illegible, covering most of its surface. In the hours
Between midnight and 4 A.M. it assumes a fitful
But calm sedentary existence, and it is then that
You may reach in and take out a name, any name,
And it will be your own, at least while
The walls of Bill’s villa resonate with the intermittent,
Migraine-like drone of motorized gondolas and the distant
Murmur of cats. To be treated, at times like these,
To free speech is an aspect of the dream and of Dreamland
In general that asserts an even larger
View of the universe pinned on the midnight-blue
Backcloth of the universe that can’t understand
Who all these people are, and about what
So much fuss
is being made: it ignores its own entrails
And we love it even more for it until we too
Are parted like curtains across the empty stage of its memory.
The house was for living in,
So much was sure. But when the ways split
And we saw out over what was after all
Water and dawn, and prayed to the rocks
Overhead, and no answer was forthcoming,
It was then that the cosmic relaxer released us.
We were together on such a day. You, oddly
But becomingly dressed, pointed out that that
Day is today, the moral. All that.
Hittite Lullaby
This time for you
The hair-blackened beans
And next semester the shouting
In carpeted corridors
More letters from the Sphinx
About what it was like
I greet you. I call to you
To release me from the contract
Morning flaps like a garment
Over a corner of the city
In mistrust with tears streaming
I can see clearly to know precisely
What is meant. My tact merely
A delaying stratagem
Is all I have. The sunlight
On your broad feet today
Withheld smiling.
Why did we board the ocean liner
Of lust signals out into the fog
Knowing there were excursions
But not this big one? My dog
Has died, I think. I come on you
All aspirations in the teeth
Of some pedantic ritual.
You take me where we were born.
In a Boat
Even when confronted by the small breakwater
That juts out from the pebbled shore of truth
You arch your eyebrows toward the daytime stars
And remind me, “This is how I was. This was the last
Part of me you were to know.” And I can see the lot
Ending in the wood of general indifference to hostility
That wants to know how with two such people around
So much is finishing, so much rushing through the present.
There was a tag on the little sailboat
That idled there, all its sails rolled up
