by John Ashbery
But since it was night, no one knew or cared. The owl,
For all his feathers, was a-cold. Peace lay in sections
On the raised edge of a circus ring, where sawdust
Conjures belly’s emptiness and the recent elections
Are commented. Men prowl
Beside the recently abandoned pier
Sprung from any concept, from reckonings, crust
Of someone else’s negligence, our cognizance.
O skate too far away, or else backpack, backtrack
Into the hay of an argument dimly seen, unscathed
Like time. The more marbles to our monument
The more the future won’t be any less real to us, enswathed
In Hyperborean conundrums—that’s as may be. To bushwhack
From here to Petaluma, then chance
Failed irrigation canals, faults, is my soul’s sole integument.
I FOUND THEIR ADVICE
When you hear the language
(not the spirit of the language) it unfolds like a shelf
just to be equal with the level you have risen to.
A change takes place. No longer are steel leviathans erected
at points of entry to the city. The clouds have come down
to be a part of what they and we so long dreaded.
And we who cling in wonderment to a sheer surface
like chains of bubbles, we who talk and lecture,
know that it is half-past five, that what we were learning
has begun.
Who thought we weren’t learning because we hadn’t stopped learning,
know all learning is going. In the silence, the dear gray
crevices are scrutable as ever. But knowing
time as a blur comforts us, seals us
from inherited light, too fast and unsorted: who
knows what organic matter is contained there,
what difference to the environment?
The last fires are banked, the strip-search is less precise.
Now they just ask you what you’re doing here,
or were doing here; it’s not a ceremonial
but it doesn’t jostle. The garden, the atrium are included
I’m afraid in the voice of praise, and the sleeping vines
machined for this feeling that has to leave:
willful, a chance for us.
FRENCH OPERA
Hi. I’m bob.
The long flight is over
and they have returned to the places
where they live in the ground.
The beloved past
is near, cautiously optimistic:
I’ve laid so much drawing over
the empty, original square, that it
almost ties figure
to ground, plot to decaying
character, last year with next.
I’m like a keeper of drawings:
they’re fragile, lonely sometimes,
like best friends erected on the dark lace
of the sometime sonatas. Only let me not
checker my face with the derring-do of
having once been somewhere, of
having been brought down from the mountains
to testify in court, and gone back up again,
senseless, the stenographer reminds
us. We’re trying to adhere
to it, to give you some money to tell her
you’re here. In the responsory we could make
it go somewhere, round and round
the track if you wish, but do we
know where they teach? Do they sing?
In French opera, Charpentier’s Julien,
for example, the problem is always the listener’s:
trying to make sense of it all and feel sorry
for the characters and still keep faith
in ourselves and what others are doing, industriously,
nay, zealously, and the payoff
is always in the next yard.
Still, no building collapses.
Reinforcements are on the way.
There is a whole lot of colored
imagery to sort out and sift away,
being careful not to get any of it
on one’s clothes. There are forklifts
and fedoras. In short this is that
old chapel scene you once wanted to know
about, except that moving sands cover
the boards then as always.
You might wish to shift in your chair.
A STIFLED NOTATION
No one ever oversleeps
until the time you are to improve your life, and then
what’s one superstition more or less?
The lives, I guess. And it’s best to be early
about things, not drink too much,
lest the pattern be seen in its undoing.
The judges march backward up the steps.
Well, you’ve solved this week’s problem,
but the wind is wailing a little too enthusiastically
as the garden takes up the fugue at a point
where it’s impossible to be lonesome and valid anymore.
The fishes swim, birds plod fustily
with heaven-dividing cries, until the whole world seems soaked
in the boredom of that sorrow you were promised,
but also
crazy with love and self-deception. Sometimes a charcoal sketch
of a refrigerator is supposed to be the edge.
How long you had no aim
for no other stream.
HAUNTED STANZAS
It has been raining on and off for a week now:
drip, drip. Already we are beginning to feel the effects of this,
as life slides insensibly onward. In one corner
a harpsichord is shelling peas. Watch out for rowboats!
When the new series of etudes was published it
caused quite a stir in the musical world.
Darkness was more perfect. Happiness no longer
was a thing to hold on to, but became a great curve,
listening instead. We don’t know what pressures
you to behave as we do. We only do it out
of fear and love, meddling like
guardian angels with what does in fact concern us
a little.
Unbattered the storm plays, like a lion cub,
the bolts tremendous, and the basement is still coming apart.
I am less than enthused though a cautious display of differentiated
levels would be the appropriate note here. The thing done,
and the apron that came after.
I am not prepared to give up my life for a few drawings.
Nevertheless I want reassurance, as if this were the Mesozoic era and
people saw themselves differently as so much meat and whiskers.
I’m not sure I wouldn’t have been enchanted
to have those advantages and see how women live when they’re away
from men and don’t have to think about it.
So the carpenter makes a list of
whatever might be needed and the ritual
gains in transparency from that.
Even the little piles of dust in the schoolyard had their say
and thought differently about it only they came to be in the end
what navigators had never asked for: the whole planisphere
pressed into one’s hand like currants.
Who praises rigor?
The ones who have less to lose. Who live
in harm’s way and poetry is as a vice to them. Never
mind, it is more meaningful that the settlers were unwearied,
as, given our best days, we all are. So I feel connected,
the car slithers forward, meanwhile
let me lick your shirt. I have an honest proposition to make
to you, one that I hope you’ll find rewarding: turn
your back so as not to see the parade of prisoners escaping.
It’ll do them good and it’ll do you good. You have it in your power
to offer proof of the equations amid the alembics of the tower
where the gas flares and your nerves buzz. Well?
Shouldn’t you be off and running? Until another day, then.
And he saddles his horse, which he called “Old Paint” (never
knew why, except that its rough exterior was somewhat suggestive of old paint)
and that was it. But I want to pray for you, whole
afternoons-worth, I do. But sometimes the sledge is honest. It bears us away.
LIVELONG DAYS
Feather in your cap? Not from heeding
the half-lit messages of other writers
you cherish and would like to forget.
I sat at my desk; the storm was brewing
on an April morning. The sun still shone
and the bud had blasted. There were shadows on the ground.
Yet I sat, not doing, not worrying whether we’re living in it right.
And when her younger sister found out who I was,
why, that would take precedence. Certainly
we’d all be here a while longer
that would mean time to find out,
to test the fiddle’s scrolled-up tensions
in case everything came out all right.
Those were the days for living in a sack,
a loose one for answering the door in.
The neighbors kept you up all night
with whispering and indecisions. It was time to
look into “Aunt Agatha’s Tried and True Recipes” just to see
who was mulling it and if they could
somehow get back to you once the joint was cold.
Alas, these spoke only in terms appropriate to the occasion,
too much so, in fact. Where was the residue
of calm fear, the notices
to convene with the lawn chairs, that prompted inspection of other
recent ordinances? And the doormat wiggled like a ghost
in the draft under the door but there was quite a lot to be said
and none willing to go down, slog down if need be, the painted stair
whose ends were invisible
in this tide of sick summer light
wherever feet chose to take one, here
among the weeds and provisions, there in the rue,
and make chaff of all we built, all we had constructed against.
That is a way of being, it said. All right,
I won’t argue, but show me the increment, fine as lint,
apparently, that tips it, festoons
a tree in the room, and finally delivers the book
to a publisher just as the door is closing. I won’t envy it.
If I had the wings of an angel something, or everything,
would be slightly different, and you’d see: it would
come out in play. The differences that make us inexact now would
chase us into learning from that space, that pure longing
for the pauses just past, multiplying like mythologies, apples.
QUARTET
Always
because I saw the most beautiful
name go down ahead of mine
I’m banished to an asteroid
perfect meld of soppy common sense
with somewhere a loose connection
only don’t make me think it
always
I’m figuring out what went just before
with that which comes too late:
invitation to a pool party
where the hors-d’oeuvres are free
as well as the first drink but not
the later ones
this was pretty late in the season
for me I told a tired invisible guest
but one must invade new premises
scout new locations
from time to time I said he seemed
to agree
that my date hadn’t been seen in some time
oh well I was trying to lose her suppose
we go upstairs and just have a look round
flash bulbs popping
I said
well anyway as it is baked so shall it endure
and the co-ordinated midriffs be here
at 10:30 sharp no one moves
before every hand is on stage I
think I know what that meant he said
there’d be no more coffee and doughnuts
before this smooth introduction I believe I’m
one of your friends of course he said make room for Miss Scott
I suppose it’s idle of me to worry
how other people will take the cold
it belongs to each of us like a blanket
and like fear doesn’t go away
though it does go away in the evening
and return in the morning
and each of us deals with it
like bowels or bladder like
it or not I said we is each
a machine for milling or sorting whatever
gets digested or eliminated there’s no
planning to stop for a while
taking a brief vacation
taking in some theater or old film
it’s useless because bad
we pronounced ourselves part of the
joint agreement
and indeed I just meant to come back for a moment
to make sure I hadn’t left anything behind
and lo and behold I am the central protagonist
in this cabana and all that was
going to be hid from me is hid
and everything looks quite normal
and so I shall approve the document
there’s no earthly reason not to
is there
I said and he said no it’s all past in the weather
and no matter what private associations are
set in motion by this train of thought no
change can ever be the result
I saw where he was leading
and it was centuries before I could disentangle
my sense of what I thought was right from the legal
obligation to bind everything into a sheaf
to recognize myself on your mirror
when we both returned to the dark pond
agreeing it best to nourish the affection
with toasts and witty consolation
rather than undertake a new epic
that might get bogged down in production
anything rather than those covered wagons
converging on a new day and he said I’m with you
I can’t understand what the cue cards
mean about it snowing outside the sanitarium
solarium and is it true I am to spend my entire life meddling
with someone else’s desires and then piecing
everything together just before it all blows up and I can
say yes once I had the meaning of it it was pretty good
and now all can see the meaning in it and I have forgotten
it all but it all still seems pretty good I guess he said
And now I cannot remember how I would have had it. It is not a conduit (confluence?) but a place. The place, of movement and an order. The place of old order. But the tail end of the movement is new. Driving us to say what we are thinking. It is so much like a beach after all, where you stand and think of going no further. And it is good when you get to no further. It is like a reason that picks you up and places you where you always wanted to be. This far. It is fair to be crossing, to have crossed. Then there is no promise in the other. Here it is. Steel and air, a mottled presence, small panacea and lucky for us. And then it got very cool.
OEUVRES COMPLÈTES
Everyone seemed pleased, even the then-invisible statisticians
who brought us to this pass. My barometer is working well;
a drop of milk in the scudding blue thinks so.
Maybe if I were shorter
the sky would stand up to greet me contemptuously
in that endearing way it sometimes has. My train is being flagged down.
Surely it’s time to go where they want us to go.
I was never big on reading
though I enjoyed singing when I knew the words
which wasn’t that often. And you, you sang with me
in the evenings for a while, and Minnie and Joe the goat joined in.
It was as impossible to enjoy the unseemliness of that present
as it was not to forget it, to cover it with showers
once spring had come. Once spring had come
the gigantic tail of a horse projected beyond the barn door.
The tail, I mean the tale, was beginning for us again
in ways too complicated to scrutinize, but we did come up with a set of questions.
Then the interviewer said that was all for that day.
The vice-president looked tired.
Back in my shack at low tide
I rehearsed the speech I would never have occasion to deliver.
Once I put pebbles in my mouth
though it lent no conviction to the list of wildflowers I was annotating.
I would say that on the whole it has been a good experience,
but I would also say that everything has been a good experience.
I touched needles, and learned how they were sharp.
Later I became a sharp dresser
having mastered the art of mix and match.
I think I’m going home now, to tea, it’s sleepy:
just say maybe sir, ask the right gent
about it, he always gets it right
and then we’re on the right track, which is always a relief,
isn’t it? But I have something to tell you.
It was wrong of you to play this far, first; and when you had finished
you should not have raised your eyes to the sea that blinded us
through the open doors, even as you thought you had married it
and were obliged to. Or something. At this rate none of us will get our
sponge in time, while the river overflows with fish.
Be careful of that puddle.
If they knew we had indulged each other—but what earthly
use does anything have? Why are we here? I’ll tell you:
it’s so the little naked man can run out into the grass
that towers over him, sprayed with dewdrops,
