by John Ashbery
Kind of empty in the way it sees everything, the earth gets to its feet and salutes the sky. More of a success at it this time than most others it is. The feeling that the sky might be in the back of someone’s mind. Then there is no telling how many there are. They grace everything—bush and tree—to take the roisterer’s mind off his caroling—so it’s like a smooth switch back. To what was aired in their previous conniption fit. There is so much to be seen everywhere that it’s like not getting used to it, only there is so much it never feels new, never any different. You are standing looking at that building and you cannot take it all in, certain details are already hazy and the mind boggles. What will it all be like in five years’ time when you try to remember? Will there have been boards in between the grass part and the edge of the street? As long as that couple is stopping to look in that window over there we cannot go. We feel like they have to tell us we can, but they never look our way and they are already gone, gone far into the future—the night of time. If we could look at a photograph of it and say there they are, they never really stopped but there they are. There is so much to be said, and on the surface of it very little gets said.
There ought to be room for more things, for a spreading out, like. Being immersed in the details of rock and field and slope—letting them come to you for once, and then meeting them halfway would be so much easier—if they took an ingenuous pride in being in one’s blood. Alas, we perceive them if at all as those things that were meant to be put aside—costumes of the supporting actors or voice trilling at the end of a narrow enclosed street. You can do nothing with them. Not even offer to pay.
It is possible that finally, like coming to the end of a long, barely perceptible rise, there is mutual cohesion and interaction. The whole scene is fixed in your mind, the music all present, as though you could see each note as well as hear it. I say this because there is an uneasiness in things just now. Waiting for something to be over before you are forced to notice it. The pollarded trees scarcely bucking the wind—and yet it’s keen, it makes you fall over. Clabbered sky. Seasons that pass with a rush. After all it’s their time too—nothing says they aren’t to make something of it. As for Jenny Wren, she cares, hopping about on her little twig like she was tryin’ to tell us somethin’, but that’s just it, she couldn’t even if she wanted to—dumb bird. But the others—and they in some way must know too—it would never occur to them to want to, even if they could take the first step of the terrible journey toward feeling somebody should act, that ends in utter confusion and hopelessness, east of the sun and west of the moon. So their comment is: “No comment.” Meanwhile the whole history of probabilities is coming to life, starting in the upper left-hand corner, like a sail.
French Poems
for Anne and Rodrigo Moynihan
1.
The sources of these things being very distant
It is appropriate to find them, which is why mist
And night have “affixed the seals” to all the ardor
Of the secret of the search. Not to confound it
But to assure its living aeration.
And yet it is more in the mass
Of the mist that some day the same contacts
Will be able to unfold. I am thinking of the dance of the
Solid lightning-flashes under the cold and
Haughty sky all striated with invisible marblings.
And it does seem that all the force of
The cosmic temperature lives in the form of contacts
That no intervention could resolve,
Even that of a creator returned to the desolate
Scene of this first experiment: this microcosm.
2.
All kinds of things exist, and, what is more,
Specimens of these things, which do not make themselves known.
I am speaking of the laugh of the squire and the spur
Which are like a hole in the armor of the day.
It’s annoying and then it’s so natural
That we experience almost no feeling
Except a certain lightness which matches
The recent closed ambiance which is, besides,
Full of attentions for us. Thus, lightness and wealth.
But the existence of all these things and especially
The amazing fullness of their number must be
For us a source of unforgettable questions:
Such as: whence does all this come? and again:
Shall I some day be a part of all this fullness?
3.
For it does seem as though everything will once again become number and smile
And that no hope of completing the magnitude which surrounds us
Is permitted us. But this hope (which doesn’t exist) is
Precisely a form of suspended birth,
Of that invisible light which spatters the silence
Of our everyday festivities. A glebe which has pursued
Its intentions of duration at the same time as reinforcing
Its basic position so that it is now
A boiling crater, form of everything that is beautiful for us.
4.
Simple, the trees placed on the landscape
Like sheaves of wheat that someone might have left there.
The manure of vanished horses, the stones that imitate it,
Everything speaks of the heavens, which created this scene
For our position alone.
Now, in associating oneself too strictly with the trajectories of things
One loses that sublime hope made of the light that sprinkles the trees.
For each progress is negation, of movement and in particular of number.
This number having lost its indescribable fineness,
Everything must be perceived as infinite quantities of things.
Everything is landscape:
Perspectives of cliffs beaten by innumerable waves,
More wheatfields than you can count, forests
With disappearing paths, stone towers
And finally and above all the great urban centers, with
Their office buildings and populations, at the center of which
We live our lives, made up of a great quantity of isolated instants
So as to be lost at the heart of a multitude of things.
5.
It is probably on one of the inside pages
That the history of his timidity will be written,
With all the libertine thoughts of a trajectory
Roughly in the shape of a heart, around a swamp
Which for many of us will be the ultimate voyage
In view of the small amount of grace which has been accorded us,
This banality which in the last analysis is our
Most precious possession, because allowing us to
Rise above ourselves, which would not be very much
Without the presence of a lot of friends and enemies, all
Willing to swear allegiance to us, entering thus
The factory of our lives. The greatest among us, counting little
On this last-minute ennoblement, remain
Colossal, our wide-brimmed hats representing
All the shame of glory, shutting us up in the idea of number:
The ether dividing our victories, past and future: teeth and blood.
The Double Dream of Spring
for Gerrit Henry
Mixed days, the mindless years, perceived
With half-parted lips
The way the breath of spring creeps up on you and floors you.
I had thought of all this years before
But now it was making no sense. And the song had finished:
This was the story.
Just as you find men with yellow hair and blue eyes
Among certain islands
The design is complete
And one keeps walking down to the shore
Footsteps searching it
Yet they can’t have it can’t not have the tune that way
And we keep stepping … down …
The rowboat rocked as you stepped into it. How flat its bottom
The little poles pushed away from the small waves in the water
And so outward. Yet we turn
To examine each other in the dream. Was it sap
Coursing in the tree
That made the buds stand out, each with a peculiar coherency?
For certainly the sidewalk led
To a point somewhere beyond itself
Caught, lost in millions of tree-analogies
Being the furthest step one might find.
And now amid the churring of locomotives
Moving on the land the grass lies over passive
Beetling its “end of the journey” mentality into your forehead
Like so much blond hair awash
Sick starlight on the night
That is readying its defenses again
As day comes up
Rural Objects
Wasn’t there some way in which you too understood
About being there in the time as it was then?
A golden moment, full of life and health?
Why can’t this moment be enough for us as we have become?
Is it because it was mostly made up of understanding
How the future would behave when we had moved on
To other lands, other suns, to say all there is time for
Because time is just what this instant is?
Even at the beginning the manner of the hourglass
Was all-severing, weaning of that delicious thread
That comes down even to us, “Bénédiction de Dieu dans la Solitude”
Sand shaper, whistler of affectionate destinies, flames and fruit.
And now you are this thing that is outside me,
And how I in token of it am like you is
In place. In between are the bits of information
That circulate around you, all that ancient stuff,
Brought here, reassembled, carted off again
Into the back yard of your dream. If we are closer
To anything, it is in this sense that doesn’t count,
Like the last few blank pages of a book.
This is why I look at you
With the eyes you once liked so much in animals:
When, in that sense, is it to be?
An ultimate warm day of the year
With the light unapproachable on the beaches?
In which case you return to the fork in the road
Doubtless to take the same path again? The second-time knowledge
Gives it fluency, makes it less of a choice
As you are older and in a dream touch bottom.
The laburnum darkened, denser at the deserted lake;
Mountain ash mindlessly dropping berries: to whom is all this?
I tell you, we are being called back
For having forgotten these names
For forgetting our proper names, for falling like nameless things
On unfamiliar slopes. To be seen again, churlishly into life,
Returning, as to the scene of a crime.
That is how the singer spoke,
In vague terms, but with an eternity of thirst
To end with a small tumbler of water
Or a single pink, leaning against the window frame in the bubble evening,
The mind of our birth. It was all sad and real.
They slept together at the commercial school.
The binding of a book made a tall V, like undone hair,
“To say all there was never time for.”
It is no triumph to point out
That no accounting was ever asked.
The land lies flat under the umbrella
Of anxiety perpetually smoothed over
As though some token were required of how each
Arrived early for the appointment in different cities.
The least suspicion would have crumbled,
Positive, but in the end you were right to
Pillage and obstruct. And she
Stared at her toes. The argument
Can be brought back intact to the point
Of summarizing how it’s just a cheap way
Of letting you off, and finally
How blue objects protruded out of the
Potential, dying and recoiling, returning as you meet them
Touching forever, water lifted out of the sea.
Years of Indiscretion
Whatever your eye alights on this morning is yours:
Dotted rhythms of colors as they fade to the color,
A gray agate, translucent and firm, with nothing
Beyond its purifying reach. It’s all there.
These are things offered to your participation.
These pebbles in a row are the seasons.
This is a house in which you may wish to live.
There are more than any of us to choose from
But each must live its own time.
And with the urging of the year each hastens onward separately
In strange sensations of emptiness, anguish, romantic
Outbursts, visions and wraiths. One meeting
Cancels another. “The seven-league boot
Gliding hither and thither of its own accord”
Salutes these forms for what they now are:
Fables that time invents
To explain its passing. They entertain
The very young and the very old, and not
One’s standing up in them to shoulder
Task and vision, vision in the form of a task
So that the present seems like yesterday
And yesterday the place where we left off a little while ago.
Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape
The first of the undecoded messages read: “Popeye sits in thunder,
Unthought of. From that shoebox of an apartment,
From livid curtain’s hue, a tangram emerges: a country.”
Meanwhile the Sea Hag was relaxing on a green couch: “How pleasant
To spend one’s vacation en la casa de Popeye,” she scratched
Her cleft chin’s solitary hair. She remembered spinach
And was going to ask Wimpy if he had bought any spinach.
“M’love,” he intercepted, “the plains are decked out in thunder
Today, and it shall be as you wish.” He scratched
The part of his head under his hat. The apartment
Seemed to grow smaller. “But what if no pleasant
Inspiration plunge us now to the stars? For this is my country.”
Suddenly they remembered how it was cheaper in the country.
Wimpy was thoughtfully cutting open a number 2 can of spinach
When the door opened and Swee’pea crept in. “How pleasant!”
But Swee’pea looked morose. A note was pinned to his bib. “Thunder
And tears are unavailing,” it read. “Henceforth shall Popeye’s apartment
Be but remembered space, toxic or salubrious, whole or scratched.”
Olive came hurtling through the window; its geraniums scratched
Her long thigh. “I have news!” she gasped. “Popeye, forced as you know to flee the country
One musty gusty evening, by the schemes of his wizened, duplicate father, jealous of the apartment
And all that it contains, myself and spinach
In particular, heaves bolts of loving thunder
At his own astonished becoming, rupturing the pleasant
Arpeggio of our years. No more shall pleasant
Rays of the sun refresh your sense of growing old, nor the scratched
Tree-trunks and mossy foliage, only immaculate darkness and thunder.”
She grabbed Swee’pea. “I’m taking the brat to the country.”
“But you can’t do that—he
hasn’t even finished his spinach,”
Urged the Sea Hag, looking fearfully around at the apartment.
But Olive was already out of earshot. Now the apartment
Succumbed to a strange new hush. “Actually it’s quite pleasant
Here,” thought the Sea Hag. “If this is all we need fear from spinach
Then I don’t mind so much. Perhaps we could invite Alice the Goon over”—she scratched
One dug pensively—“but Wimpy is such a country
Bumpkin, always burping like that.” Minute at first, the thunder
Soon filled the apartment. It was domestic thunder,
The color of spinach. Popeye chuckled and scratched
His balls: it sure was pleasant to spend a day in the country.
Sunrise in Suburbia
The tone is hard is heard
Is the coming of strength out of night: unfeared;
Still the colors are there and they
Ask the question of this what is to be
Out of a desert of chance in which being is life
But like a paradox, death reinforcing the life,
Sound under memory, as though our right to hear
Hid old unwillingness to continue
Or a style of turning to the window
Hands directing the air, and no design sticks,
Only agreement not to let it die.
Others will bend these as it is possible
And a new mode will be sunning into the past:
Refreshment and ease to the statement
And back to the safe beginning, because it starts out
Once more, drawn to and fro in a warm current of breathing
As fires start in hope and cold and
Color those nearest and only warm the most distant.
The inflection is suspended,
Not to be thoroughly initiated, under a spell to continue;
Its articulate flatness, goal, barrier and climate.
Through the clutter of
The unbound year, the first dazed marks of waking
Stir on the cloud-face like texture of paper, breath at elbow
And the collapsed sign of yesterday afternoon, its
Variance put up like a shutter,
Taxing you into January of stomping, cursing and the breath-bite.
The entrance you need is
