by John Ashbery
With us, sweeps us up into something, some way to be
With pleasure and not be too long about it so the mood stays
But isn’t fixed? If only I’d known what I was getting into
That day in Arizona, I’d have taken another detour, but you see
When you see gravel, you think roadbed, automatically, forgetting how little
It takes to set anybody off, buzzing into dreams. Old papers and
Memoirs. Feet under the desk. A tiny girl who smiles and is prepared.
What year was that? Who was in power then? By what
Sin have we been burned? And did the president point
His pointer at the blackboard to the word “articulate,” and did
Those feet reiterate the premise, damp down through the ages, fresh, yes,
But so ancient, like an ague. Teeth chattering, all proceeded to the dump.
After all, it would be time soon.
After all, nobody knows how to make this any more. You can’t
Find us in their lounges. Soon, soon, however, the overpass takes us home.
The leaves are spent, lying in a ditch. Girls gone. The music, the horses took off.
THE LITTLE BLACK DRESS
All that we are trying most defiantly to unravel
is waiting, close to the path. Yes,
but the pace is both relaxed and insistent,
a swimming up from under. Your plan sounds fine.
I knew a brunette once in Omaha,
he said, and that struck us as news. He hadn’t
been out of the truck long. On the dank ground the new
willow leaves lay, a reproof to him and us.
Why can’t the clay bind us more firmly still,
until he can read,
get something out of these notations that arrive
every day, like letters, O not in the empty house.
PART OF THE SUPERSTITION
Help, when it came, came from an unexpected place.
It was so nice he couldn’t sleep. Our rooms darken
with every new place of experience. All roses
admit this, and life stays on, fidgeting, their dream
disappointed, on the run, and it’s your fault,
who never had the courage to know nothing and simultaneously
be attentive. That’s where the secret comes in,
and, as you might expect, it’s quite unhandy,
especially if you’re in a coma. Now I don’t want
to have to speak to you again; we’re on the way down,
that much is assured, and leggy growth has to stop somewhere,
at least it did in my day. About what colors to buy:
this is something each dean and priest decides
for himself, and then they melt and turn into the jackpot,
which is a little disturbing. Don’t squirm,
however, there are other houses on this road to peace
we can actually live in, as a snail its shell,
or bird pants. Then a calend grabs your hand
and tugs you into the future, and that’s about all the space
there is left. Wipe your nose. Don’t fudge
the horizon or it will come clattering down
on us like the earthquake at Lisbon, but always,
be brave. Yet these are old wives’ tales,
in truth; nothing insists you believe in them
except as dreams, which permeate the background
of our day like colored raindrops, and so go away
before too long. Many have turned back
at this point; the trials, the trails, are thistles,
inherently unrewarding. Yet those who wish to play
say many are pleased to be in that day:
pleased, and not a little scared, but from where
will peace come if not from those beetling crags?
So many varied stimuli, and I
was nigh to frantic, as it may believe you,
and has for other hosts. Yet these passions, arrayed
like infantry, continue to absorb and confuse
by turns. No use shouting about waste, it was
a necessary corner in your apartment that couldn’t be filled
by anything but its own besottedness. And we think, when we
do play, that a special aggravation
has sunk its beak in us like Prometheus’ eagle,
yet all proceeds from an inability and desire to win
leading to narrow channels and bogus expectations.
Cut short the customary peroration:
its wings soar o’er us still, or will be, and we, we’ll
have a hand in sorting them out, strand
by tinted strand, and be sure a life will arise swollen from this:
a vacant place in the story. My glory
when it comes will resemble yours in its feinting
and the way it orders waiters with soiled aprons around.
We can be back for much of it. Haste, arise;
a big thing is happening to everyone. We were so prudent
in our clothes back there it got forgotten, blurred
with the wet lawn. And when the president
looked out his window he saw it, and ran to tell the vice-president,
and so a compact was kept. I sure wish
it were possible to pole oneself more than a few feet off this shore,
but it seems to want us. And I can’t explain how a muskrat
would ever know about such a thing, yet it did.
So there were times in between like the seasons
and the times between them when peaches fall,
and dancers sift across the stage like leaves,
and these are dark times. Only remember that the figure
worked deep into the fabric implodes there;
has a next, a resting place. It is from the multiplication
of similar wacko configurations that theses do arise
to attest the efficacy of this castor oil,
this medicine. And if why we want to go away
is as plain as the nose on your face, the buried village,
cut out of rose-petal limestone, is still standing. Haply
some faith trickles out of it, and is not lost
in the glittering grass, but persists to become a torrent,
then a turret, somewhere else. For there is a key,
and it leads to your door. Yet it is only repetition, something
the seasons like a lot. And as you get up to go you mutter,
and that’s it!—the fortunate crisis that was always
going to stave us off, and explain so much
about car wrecks, and postage stamps and the like.
Farewell in the rain; it is surely lucky to know
as much as we do, and not to know as much
as we do. Or were taught was proper. Papers
will explain it, music it. That’s a promise.
THE ART OF SPEEDING
And when some sidle awkwardly,
why, the grove is green again. There is more than enough catfood
for two, she said. And I think I belong in this prism.
Day means more than luck itself to me,
but I shall be forgotten
on a shore made monotonous by the inverted hulls of rowboats.
There is more than enough time for me,
sympathy too. I’m the cap and bells that don’t belong.
A free-lance artist. The last and first of the romantics.
Sometimes a suppler season weaves pliant straws
into a crown for no one in particular.
This hiatus is my legacy:
a patterned map whose symmetries invite exploration
yet in the end repel the cold traveler, wrapped
in gray at the end of the mole.
He sees farther into the rising banister of the city’s rage
and shuts out all ivory memories like pestile
nce.
Indeed he is the naked forager.
But when tomatoes are ripe and girls
don’t mind, and the sun is civil again, then
look in your shoeboxes for sheaves of snapshots
that came over us and were here, wild as the wilderness.
We forgot who was talking to us on the quay.
It just might have been a distinguished stranger.
Now his visor keeps us from noticing
his general appearance, but genially we all say
how much we have loved this place, how gay
are the receipts. All we have to do is stay.
Yet more pictures are involved than the accountant
realizes, moaning over his headache: sometimes it agrees
with us to say we do. And then the game is darker;
no one pauses in the rain.
AMERICAN BAR
We bake a dozen kinds of muffins every day
yet we are cold and disquieting at heart.
I fear for his sciatica, though
we were never lovers.
Let me memorialize this mattress, M.
le Comte, he will be decent
in this fog that emanates from everything
though the air is fresh and sunny. Thought
about wandering down to the river to have a
look at the water. It always has so much to say,
more than the upended rain barrel in its day
had. See the monkey in its cage.
Bright eyes are feasting again and again.
In the casual track of a zipper my penis
once got stuck, and it’s been like that ever since:
feet stop where no snare lives, the best
is to die down and desist. Perhaps life is better
near the Arctic Circle, where the buildings are plain
and no trees sing. One can feel totally indoors.
The wireless plays a lanky tune;
there are spots on the wall from the moisture
you either keep out or keep in. I forget which,
and what a bird looks like. The winter night drones on
for centuries, and what keeps us at peace is actually
the sight of an empty cage
and a few children’s drawings of it.
My, we have raced to be equivocally here
and have invented what sign? Off of what do we climb
to the lower level, what compact fleet of stairs
is nestled here? Or did we bowdlerize each other’s delirium
in fear of having the last word, and it frightened us off the page?
In any case have a ripping good time. The boars
will be here around then, as you know.
FROM PALOOKAVILLE
“Death cancels all engagements.”
—Clifton Webb, in the movie Laura
The midgets stand on giants who stand on midgets
in Palookaville
that day of storm notwithstanding and it still takes one
on out to the “farther reaches” where boys play and maids bay
at the moon
in my Palookaville
where the stench of farts drenches outside irony with the dust of snow
where all is served up right
to blond kids in history books on the gothic outskirts
where everything gets unravelled just right
where you can see a coincidence coming for miles down the valley
along the trestle when the snow the femurs the cries
demur and act unwise
at a time when centers shatter in strict unison
when doubt is in the call of the fox
and the sunsets are like weddings
I came here of my own accord
from Djakarta
I’m as old as you are and dare to say so
but the falling liaisons spat out like miles of thread
are the lining of time’s one easy lesson
the shocks deep and narrow like crevasses dog teams fly over
over and around
aiming no way to please
and it does in the arrested quickness of the visit, task—
even life is the least bit pejorative
but not the costumes the calendar
the trivia the painted trappings
to come undone
in your embrace and that’s the word
You were sent for and that is all
no word on why some became
the anvil
and from here all that runs is dust
or consommé there was fear smeared again on the walk
and for two consecutive days
we go out on it it’s pretty safe
so far
on the fifth day a bank fails there are great falls
and iodine in the little house
it smells more like an accord this time
and then there were birds you know too soft
this time for much
of an answer
and they came were there under steel arcades
the night brings its business along
stalls as though a feint saved the day one
other time and now it’s horses all around for anybody that thinks
they’ve got a contusion or a monopoly
surely it was warm faces all round
The accents are distant as bells in that other hometown
the stories often gory
tell why please the accents and your own personal vignette came up
without a number and no one explained the cause
a dim musicale in some small room
folded under netting as though the crows stood by
to watch
under the felt cushion something impolite zoomed
it was suggested that we all carry away
our traces that we dispose of them “thoughtfully”
so as not to leave any bones of an argument around
for others mauling traces
in bushes
black ones riding with white snow a pure, defined drop
of atheism and it arches out too wide, too near the circumference
of the pier too much to say for what an old man did
on a recent day and what if it comes round
on a recent day and what if we all did
and who shoved the pace of the thermometer
on an outing who shamed the toaster
who is to say
ANOTHER EXAMPLE
Of our example, earth,
we know the star-shaped universe:
divisions,
somewhere,
of July streets.
Is it a bucket you sit in
or on?
How they led us past the fence.
The one horse was mortified.
But it’s unhealthy, you say
we must have another example,
just one.
What’s wanted is faces in windows
screams that went away a long time ago.
What says to recall them?
To be revived like paper ants
and then endure the long vacuum of pre-eternity
and still be allowed to buy something
on the station platform?
The train is turning away—
There are no familiar quotations.
Here, put some on a plate, he said. That’s the way.
AVANT DE QUITTER CES LIEUX
They watch the blue snow.
It is the fifth act in someone else’s life,
but here, on Midway Island, reefs and shoals interfere
with that notion. That nothing so compact
as the idea of a season is to be allowed
is the note, for today at least. It is Tuesday morning.
They sing a duet of farewell
to their little table, and to themselves as they were
when they sat at it. Noon intersects with fat
birds
the rhythm of dishes in the cupboard. My love,
he seems to say, is this the way it is for you? Then we shall have to leave
these shabby surroundings for others, but first
I want to plant a kiss like a star
on your forehead. The ships are knocking together at the quayside,
the lanyards struck, there is more moving
than we were intended for, as we clear out
nodding to the caryatids we pass. Perhaps they will sing to us.
And in a summer house somewhere in Russia
a clematis soaks up the heat. One can think without breathing
of the blue snow that invades the fields, a curse some obscure ancestor
once let fall and now it’s the custom, duly serenaded each season
before the apples rust
and the idea of winter takes over, to be followed in short order
by the real thing.
If all of us could lead lives of razoring things out of the newspaper,
filing them on pincushions … but no. There is the father
and morning to be dealt with, and after that the students arrive.
The rhythm is broken up among them.
That was a cold year, but not
the last. It will be remembered.
Why is it you always ask me this, and this:
is there no question behind the arras of how we now meet
seconding each other’s projects, our emotions? Or is that too weak
as a question, though strong enough as an affirmation, so that we again go out
from each other. One shades one’s eyes automatically, though the sky
is dark. “We have no place to go” (the fifteenth
major situation), and if God decrees we like each other, someday
we will meet on a stone up there, and all will not be well,
but that is useful. Great rivers run into each other and graves
have split open, the tyranny of dust plays well, there is
so little to notice. Besides we have always known each other.
Except for that it was automatically the century
before this one. Thus we are made aware of the continuity
of times that were, and time itself is revealed
not as a series of rooms but a single corridor
stretching into the truth: an alpine pasture, with a few goats
and, in the distance, a hovel. It is high noon. Dinorah,
who has lost her goat, sings the mad scene for which her life
has been a preparation, sings it out of daylight, out of the outcropping
of rock overhead, out of the edelweiss and cowslips.
