by John Ashbery
Or did you mean it when you stopped? And the face
Resembles yours, the one reflected in the water.
It Was Raining in the Capital
It was raining in the capital
And for many days and nights
The one they called the Aquarian
Had stayed alone with her delight.
What with the winter and its business
It had fallen to one side
And she had only recently picked it up
Where the other had died.
Between the pages of the newspaper
It smiled like a face.
Next to the drugstore on the corner
It looked to another place.
Or it would just hang around
Like sullen clouds over the sun.
But—this was the point—it was real
To her and to everyone.
For spring had entered the capital
Walking on gigantic feet.
The smell of witch hazel indoors
Changed to narcissus in the street.
She thought she had seen all this before:
Bundles of new, fresh flowers,
All changing, pressing upward
To the distant office towers.
Until now nothing had been easy,
Hemmed in by all that shit—
Horseshit, dogshit, birdshit, manshit—
Yes, she remembered having said it,
Having spoken in that way, thinking
There could be no road ahead,
Sobbing into the intractable presence of it
As one weeps alone in bed.
Its chamber was narrower than a seed
Yet when the doorbell rang
It reduced all that living to air
As “kyrie eleison” it sang.
Hearing that music he had once known
But now forgotten, the man,
The one who had waited casually in the dark
Turned to smile at the door’s span.
He smiled and shrugged—a lesson
In the newspaper no longer
But fed by the ink and paper
Into a sign of something stronger
Who reads the news and takes the bus
Going to work each day
But who was never born of woman
Nor formed of the earth’s clay.
Then what unholy bridegroom
Did the Aquarian foretell?
Or was such lively intelligence
Only the breath of hell?
It scarcely mattered at the moment
And it shall never matter at all
Since the moment will not be replaced
But stand, poised for its fall,
Forever. “This is what my learning
Teaches,” the Aquarian said,
“To absorb life through the pores
For the life around you is dead.”
The sun came out in the capital
Just before it set.
The lovely death’s head shone in the sky
As though these two had never met.
Variations, Calypso and Fugue
on a Theme of Ella Wheeler Wilcox
“For the pleasures of the many
May be ofttimes traced to one
As the hand that plants an acorn
Shelters armies from the sun.”
And in places where the annual rainfall is .0071 inches
What a pleasure to lie under the tree, to sit, stand, and get up under the tree!
Im wunderschonen Monat Mai
The feeling is of never wanting to leave the tree,
Of predominantly peace and relaxation.
Do you step out from under the shade a moment,
It is only to return with renewed expectation, of expectation fulfilled.
Insecurity be damned! There is something to all this, that will not elude us:
Growing up under the shade of friendly trees, with our brothers all around.
And truly, young adulthood was never like this:
Such delight, such consideration, such affirmation in the way the day goes ’round together.
Yes, the world goes ’round a good deal faster
When there are highlights on the lips, unspoken and true words in the heart,
And the hand keeps brushing away a strand of chestnut hair, only to have it fall back into place again.
But all good things must come to an end, and so one must move forward
Into the space left by one’s conclusions. Is this growing old?
Well, it is a good experience, to divest oneself of some tested ideals, some old standbys,
And even finding nothing to put in their place is a good experience,
Preparing one, as it does, for the consternation that is to come.
But—and this is the gist of it—what if I dreamed it all,
The branches, the late afternoon sun,
The trusting camaraderie, the love that watered all,
Disappearing promptly down into the roots as it should?
For later in the vast gloom of cities, only there you learn
How the ideas were good only because they had to die,
Leaving you alone and skinless, a drawing by Vesalius.
This is what was meant, and toward which everything directs:
That the tree should shrivel in 120-degree heat, the acorns
Lie around on the worn earth like eyeballs, and the lead soldiers shrug and slink off.
So my youth was spent, underneath the trees
I always moved around with perfect ease
I voyaged to Paris at the age of ten
And met many prominent literary men
Gazing at the Alps was quite a sight
I felt the tears flow forth with all their might
A climb to the Acropolis meant a lot to me
I had read the Greek philosophers you see
In the Colosseum I thought my heart would burst
Thinking of all the victims who had been there first
On Mount Ararat’s side I began to grow
Remembering the Flood there, so long ago
On the banks of the Ganges I stood in mud
And watched the water light up like blood
The Great Wall of China is really a thrill
It cleaves through the air like a silver pill
It was built by the hand of man for good or ill
Showing what he can do when he decides not to kill
But of all the sights that were seen by me
In the East or West, on land or sea,
The best was the place that is spelled H-O-M-E.
Now that once again I have achieved home
I shall forbear all further urge to roam
There is a hole of truth in the green earth’s rug
Once you find it you are as snug as a bug
Maybe some do not like it quite as much as you
That isn’t all you’re going to do.
You must remember that it is yours
Which is why nobody is sending you flowers
This age-old truth I to thee impart
Act according to the dictates of your art
Because if you don’t no one else is going to
And that person isn’t likely to be you.
It is the wind that comes from afar
It is the truth of the farthest star
In all likelihood you will not need these
So take it easy and learn your ABC’s
And trust in the dream that will never come true
’Cause that is the scheme that is best for you
And the gleam that is the most suitable too.
“MAKE MY DREAM COME TRUE.” This message, set in 84-point Hobo type, startled in the morning editions of the paper: the old, half-won security troubles the new pause. And with the approach of the holidays, the present is clearly here to stay: the big brass band of its particular moment’s consciousness in
vades the plazas and the narrow alleys. Three-fourths of the houses in this city are on narrow stilts, finer than a girl’s wrists: it is largely a question of keeping one’s feet dry, and of privacy. In the morning you forget what the punishment was. Probably it was something like eating a pretzel or going into the back yard. Still, you can’t tell. These things could be a lot clearer without hurting anybody. But it does not follow that such issues will produce the most dynamic capital gains for you.
Friday. We are really missing you.
“The most suitable,” however, was not the one specially asked for nor the one hanging around the lobby. It was just the one asked after, day after day—what spilled over, claimed by the spillway. The distinction of a dog, of how a dog walks. The thought of a dog walking. No one ever referred to the incident again. The case was officially closed. Maybe there were choruses of silent gratitude, welling up in the spring night like a column of cloud, reaching to the very rafters of the sky—but this was their own business. The point is no ear ever heard them. Thus, the incident, to call it by one of its names—choice, conduct, absent-minded frown might be others—came to be not only as though it had never happened, but as though it never could have happened. Sealed into the wall of all that season’s coming on. And thus, for a mere handful of people—roustabouts and degenerates, most of them—it became the only true version. Nothing else mattered. It was bread by morning and night, the dates falling listlessly from the trees—man, woman, child, festering glistering in a single orb. The reply to “hello.”
Pink purple and blue
The way you used to do
The next two days passed oddly for Peter and Christine, and were among the most absorbing they had ever known. On the one hand, a vast open basin—or sea; on the other a narrow spit of land, terminating in a copse, with a few broken-down out-buildings lying here and there. It made no difference that the bey—b-e-y this time, oriental potentate—had ordained their release, there was this funny feeling that they should always be there, sustained by looks out over the ether, missing Mother and Alan and the others but really quiet, in a kind of activity that offers its own way of life, sunflower chained to the sun. Can it ever be resolved? Or are the forms of a person’s thoughts controlled by inexorable laws, as in Dürer’s Adam and Eve? So mutually exclusive, and so steep—Himalayas jammed side by side like New York apartment buildings. Oh the blame of it, the de-crescendo. My vice is worry. Forget it. The continual splitting up, the ear-shattering volumes of a polar ice-cap breaking up are just what you wanted. You’ve got it, so shut up.
The crystal haze
For days and days
Lots of sleep is an important factor, and rubbing the eyes. Getting off the subway he suddenly felt hungry. He went into one place, a place he knew, and ordered a hamburger and a cup of coffee. He hadn’t been in this neighborhood in a long time—not since he was a kid. He used to play stickball in the vacant lot across the street. Sometimes his bunch would get into a fight with some of the older boys, and he’d go home tired and bleeding. Most days were the same though. He’d say “Hi” to the other kids and they’d say “Hi” to him. Nice bunch of guys. Finally he decided to take a turn past the old grade school he’d attended as a kid. It was a rambling structure of yellow brick, now gone in seediness and shabbiness which the late-afternoon shadows mercifully softened. The gravel playground in front was choked with weeds. Large trees and shrubbery would do no harm flanking the main entrance. Time farted.
The first shock rattles the cruets in their stand,
The second rips the door from its hinges.
“My dear friend,” he said gently, “you said you were Professor Hertz. You must pardon me if I say that the information startles and mystifies me. When you are stronger I have some questions to ask you, if you will be kind enough to answer them.”
No one was prepared for the man’s answer to that apparently harmless statement.
Weak as he was, Gustavus Hertz raised himself on his elbow. He stared wildly about him, peering fearfully into the shadowy corners of the room.
“I will tell you nothing! Nothing, do you hear?” he shrieked. “Go away! Go away!”
Song
The song tells us of our old way of living,
Of life in former times. Fragrance of florals,
How things merely ended when they ended,
Of beginning again into a sigh. Later
Some movement is reversed and the urgent masks
Speed toward a totally unexpected end
Like clocks out of control. Is this the gesture
That was meant, long ago, the curving in
Of frustrated denials, like jungle foliage
And the simplicity of the ending all to be let go
In quick, suffocating sweetness? The day
Puts toward a nothingness of sky
Its face of rusticated brick. Sooner or later,
The cars lament, the whole business will be hurled down.
Meanwhile we sit, scarcely daring to speak,
To breathe, as though this closeness cost us life.
The pretensions of a past will some day
Make it over into progress, a growing up,
As beautiful as a new history book
With uncut pages, unseen illustrations,
And the purpose of the many stops and starts will be made clear:
Backing into the old affair of not wanting to grow
Into the night, which becomes a house, a parting of the ways
Taking us far into sleep. A dumb love.
Decoy
We hold these truths to be self-evident:
That ostracism, both political and moral, has
Its place in the twentieth-century scheme of things;
That urban chaos is the problem we have been seeing into and seeing into,
For the factory, deadpanned by its very existence into a
Descending code of values, has moved right across the road from total financial upheaval
And caught regression head-on. The descending scale does not imply
A corresponding deterioration of moral values, punctuated
By acts of corporate vandalism every five years,
Like a bunch of violets pinned to a dress, that knows and ignores its own standing.
There is every reason to rejoice with those self-styled prophets of commercial disaster, those harbingers of gloom,
Over the imminent lateness of the denouement that, advancing slowly, never arrives,
At the same time keeping the door open to a tongue-and-cheek attitude on the part of the perpetrators,
The men who sit down to their vast desks on Monday to begin planning the week’s notations, jotting memoranda that take
Invisible form in the air, like flocks of sparrows
Above the city pavements, turning and wheeling aimlessly
But on the average directed by discernible motives.
To sum up: We are fond of plotting itineraries
And our pyramiding memories, alert as dandelion fuzz, dart from one pretext to the next
Seeking in occasions new sources of memories, for memory is profit
Until the day it spreads out all its accumulation, delta-like, on the plain
For that day no good can come of remembering, and the anomalies cancel each other out.
But until then foreshortened memories will keep us going, alive, one to the other.
There was never any excuse for this and perhaps there need be none,
For kicking out into the morning, on the wide bed,
Waking far apart on the bed, the two of them:
Husband and wife
Man and wife
Evening in the Country
I am still completely happy.
My resolve to win further I have
Thrown out, and am charged by the thrill
Of the sun coming up. Birds and trees, houses,
These are but the stations for the new sign of being
; In me that is to close late, long
After the sun has set and darkness come
To the surrounding fields and hills.
But if breath could kill, then there would not be
Such an easy time of it, with men locked back there
In the smokestacks and corruption of the city.
Now as my questioning but admiring gaze expands
To magnificent outposts, I am not so much at home
With these memorabilia of vision as on a tour
Of my remotest properties, and the eidolon
Sinks into the effective “being” of each thing,
Stump or shrub, and they carry me inside
On motionless explorations of how dense a thing can be,
How light, and these are finished before they have begun
Leaving me refreshed and somehow younger.
Night has deployed rather awesome forces
Against this state of affairs: ten thousand helmeted footsoldiers,
A Spanish armada stretching to the horizon, all
Absolutely motionless until the hour to strike
But I think there is not too much to be said or be done
And that these things eventually take care of themselves
With rest and fresh air and the outdoors, and a good view of things.
So we might pass over this to the real
Subject of our concern, and that is
Have you begun to be in the context you feel
Now that the danger has been removed?
Light falls on your shoulders, as is its way,
And the process of purification continues happily,
Unimpeded, but has the motion started
That is to quiver your head, send anxious beams
Into the dusty corners of the rooms
Eventually shoot out over the landscape
In stars and bursts? For other than this we know nothing
And space is a coffin, and the sky will put out the light.
I see you eager in your wishing it the way
We may join it, if it passes close enough:
This sets the seal of distinction on the success or failure of your attempt.
There is growing in that knowledge
We may perhaps remain here, cautious yet free
On the edge, as it rolls its unblinking chariot
Into the vast open, the incredible violence and yielding
Turmoil that is to be our route.
For John Clare
