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Hotel Lautréamont

Page 10

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,

 

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