by John Ashbery
Sideways in pentagonal fields cursive in advance
Before the fathoming of spring and
Sound let deep into the flank of occurrence
As maps lean south and shrivel toward the north.
It is fine to be in on it, stone markings, always
And eventually at some limit with a high view
But cross-country skirtings were part of the next lesson
That sleep evades, and in him was no parking space
For looks dragged under windows next time, from boarded-up places
Speaking no mind into the center of the rout.
And as day followed day the plainer meaning of it
Became a constant projected on the emigration.
The tundra seemed elaborated.
Then a permanent falling back shapes, signs the residue
As a tiny wood fence’s the signature of disgust and decay
On an otherwise concerned but unmoved, specially obtruded hill:
Flatness of what remains
And modelling of what fled,
Decisions for a proper ramble into known but unimaginable, dense
Fringe expecting night,
A light wilderness of spoken words not
Unkind for all their aimlessness,
A blank chart of each day moving into the premise of difficult visibility
And which is nowhere, the urge to nowhere,
To retract that statement, sharply, within the next few minutes.
For it is as though it turns you back,
Your eyes through the recent happenings as they advance through you,
Never satisfied on the way, but
There is reasonable assurance in the way it is not seen again,
Banging of the shuttle, repeated swipes of the wind,
For the afterthought coincides: much of it was intentional.
It is aloes to be remembered toward the place
Out of which it grew like forest out of mountain, when later someone says there was no mountain
Only roads, and stars hanging over them,
Only a flat stone over the place where it says there is more.
It is a low game, too tired to sleep,
Feeling through equipment to the less developed:
“You’ve gone and mixed me up
I was happy just bumming along,
Any old way, in and out, up and down.”
The passion has left his head, and the head reports.
And then some morning there is a nuance:
Suddenly in the city dirt and varied
Ideas of rubbish, the blue day stands and
A sudden interest is there:
Lying on the cot, near the tree-shadow,
Out of the thirties having news of the true source:
Face to kiss and the wonderful hair curling down
Into margins that care and are swept up again like branches
Into actual closeness
And the little things that lighten the day
The kindness of acts long forgotten
Which give us history and faith
And parting at night, next to oceans, like the collapse of dying.
It is all noticed before it is too late
But its immobility gives no comfort, only chapter headings and folio numbers
And it can go on being divine in itself
Neither treasured nor cast down in anger
For we cannot imagine the truth of it.
This deaf rasping of branch against branch
Like a noncommittal sneer among many superimposed chimes
As we go separate ways
That have translated the foreground of paths into quoted spaces:
They are empty beyond consternation because
These are the droppings of all our lives
And they recall no past de luxe quarters
Only a last cube.
The thieves were not breaking in, the castle was not being stormed.
It was the holiness of the day that fed our notions
And released them, sly breath of Eros,
Anniversary on the woven city lament, that assures our arriving
In hours, seconds, breath, watching our salary
In the morning holocaust become one vast furnace, engaging all tears.
Definition of Blue
The rise of capitalism parallels the advance of romanticism
And the individual is dominant until the close of the nineteenth century.
In our own time, mass practices have sought to submerge the personality
By ignoring it, which has caused it instead to branch out in all directions
Far from the permanent tug that used to be its notion of “home.”
These different impetuses are received from everywhere
And are as instantly snapped back, hitting through the cold atmosphere
In one steady, intense line.
There is no remedy for this “packaging” which has supplanted the old sensations.
Formerly there would have been architectural screens at the point where the action became most difficult
As a path trails off into shrubbery—confusing, forgotten, yet continuing to exist.
But today there is no point in looking to imaginative new methods
Since all of them are in constant use. The most that can be said for them further
Is that erosion produces a kind of dust or exaggerated pumice
Which fills space and transforms it, becoming a medium
In which it is possible to recognize oneself.
Each new diversion adds its accurate touch to the ensemble, and so
A portrait, smooth as glass, is built up out of multiple corrections
And it has no relation to the space or time in which it was lived.
Only its existence is a part of all being, and is therefore, I suppose, to be prized
Beyond chasms of night that fight us
By being hidden and present.
And yet it results in a downward motion, or rather a floating one
In which the blue surroundings drift slowly up and past you
To realize themselves some day, while you, in this nether world that could not be better
Waken each morning to the exact value of what you did and said, which remains.
Parergon
We are happy in our way of life.
It doesn’t make much sense to others. We sit about,
Read, and are restless. Occasionally it becomes time
To lower the dark shade over it all.
Our entity pivots on a self-induced trance
Like sleep. Noiseless our living stops
And one strays as in a dream
Into those respectable purlieus where life is motionless and alive
To utter the few words one knows:
“O woebegone people! Why so much crying,
Such desolation in the streets?
Is it the present of flesh, that each of you
At your jagged casement window should handle,
Nervous unto thirst and ultimate death?
Meanwhile the true way is sleeping;
Your lawful acts drink an unhealthy repose
From the upturned lip of this vessel, secretly,
But it is always time for a change.
That certain sins of omission go unpunished
Does not weaken your position
But this underbrush in which you are secure
Is its doing. Farewell then,
Until, under a better sky
We may meet expended, for just doing it
Is only an excuse. We need the tether
Of entering each other’s lives, eyes wide apart, crying.”
As one who moves forward from a dream
The stranger left that house on hastening feet
Leaving behind the woman with the face shaped like an arrowhead,
And all who gazed upon him wondered at
Th
e strange activity around him.
How fast the faces kindled as he passed!
It was a marvel that no one spoke
To stem the river of his passing
Now grown to flood proportions, as on the sunlit mall
Or in the enclosure of some court
He took his pleasure, savage
And mild with the contemplating.
Yet each knew he saw only aspects,
That the continuity was fierce beyond all dream of enduring,
And turned his head away, and so
The lesson eddied far into the night:
Joyful its beams, and in the blackness blacker still,
Though undying joyousness, caught in that trap.
The Hod Carrier
You have been declining the land’s
Breakable extensions, median whose face is half my face.
Your curved visor’s the supposition that unites us.
I’ve been thinking about you
After a dry summer, fucking in the autumn,
Reflecting among arabesques of speech that arise
The certain anomaly, the wise smile
Of winter fitted over the land
And your activity disappears in mist, or translates too easily
Into a general puree, someone’s aura or idea of games—
The stone you cannot perfect, the sharp iron blade you cannot prevent.
But this new way we are, the melon head
Half-mirrored, the way sentences suddenly spurt up like gas
Or sting and jab, is it that we accepted each complication
As it came along, and are therefore happy with the result?
Or was it as a condition of seeing
That we vouchsafed aid and comfort to the seasons
As each came begging
And the present, so flat in its belief, so outside it”
As it maintains, becomes the blind side of
The fulfillment of that condition; and work, ripeness
And tired but resolute standing up for one’s rights
Mean leaning toward the stars
The way a tree leans toward the sun
Not meaning to get close
And the bird walked right up that tree.
You have reached the point closest to your destination
O tired beacon
Dominating the plain
Yet all but invisible
To the mind surrounding your purpose
You are totally subsumed
The good abstracted, squandered, thrown away
As it was in the lean time.
Are these floorboards, to be stared at
In moments of guilt, as wallpaper can stream away and yet
You cannot declare it?
Then each breath is a redeeming feature
Resolving in alteration
The inanity of flowers into perfect conditions
That their mildness can only postpone, not change.
And surveying the hundredfold record of the summer
The shapely witness declares herself at last
Content with the result:
Whitecaps wincing at every point of the compass
The justified demands of commerce, difficult departures and all
Into a hemisphere where no credit is expected
And the shipping is rendered into its own terms.
It is what keeps itself
From going blind
All aging is perpetual chatter
On these buff planes, protuberances
And you are in the wind at night
And so it is an even darker night
And death is the prevention of which the cure’s
Metal polish and sawdust
Light grinding into your heels.
An Outing
“These things … that you are going to have—
Are you paid specially for them?”
“Yes.”
“And when it is over, do you insist,
Do you insist that the visitor leave the room?”
“My activity is as random as the wind.
Why should I insist? The visitor is free to go,
Or to stay, as he chooses.”
Are you folks just going out for a walk
And if you are would you check the time
On your way back? It’s too late to do anything today.
I would just take a pratfall if I stepped outside that door.
“I don’t know whether I should apply or nothing.”
“I think you shd make yr decision.”
So it was by chance we found ourselves
Gumshod on the pebbled path, Denmark O Denmark
Flat, rounded eyes, Denmark Denmark
Gray parchment landscape Denmark O Denmark
Unmanageable sky, Denmark that cannot shift
The faucet drips, the minutes apply, Denmark.
Some Words
from the French of Arthur Cravan
Life is not at all what you might think it to be
A simple tale where each thing has its history
It’s much more than its scuffle and anything goes
Both evil and good, subject to the same laws.
Each hour has its color and forever gives place
Leaving less than yon bird of itself a trace.
In vain does memory attempt to store away
The scent of its colors in a single bouquet
Memory can but shift cold ashes around
When the depths of time it endeavors to sound.
Never think that you may be allowed, at the end,
To say to yourself, “I am of myself the friend,”
Or make with yourself a last reconciliation.
You will remain the victim of your hesitation
You will forget today before tomorrow is here
And disavow yourself while much is still far from clear.
The defunct days will offer you their images
Only so that you may read of former outrages
And the days to come will mar with their complaints
The splendor that in your honor dejected evening paints.
Wishing to collect in your heart the feelings
Scattered in the meadows of misfortune’s hard dealings
You will be the shepherd whose dog has run away
You will know even less whence comes your dismay
Than you know the hour your boredom first saw the light.
Weary of seeking day you will relish the night
In night’s dim orchards you will find some rest
The counsels of the trees of night are best
Better than those of the tree of knowledge, which corrupts us at birth
And which you allowed to flourish in the accursèd earth.
When your most arduous labors grow pale as death
And you begin to inhale autumn’s chilly breath
Winter will come soon to batter with his mace
Your precious moments, scattering them all over the place.
You will always be having to get up from your chairs
To move on to other heartbreaks, be caught in other snares.
The seasons will revolve on their scented course
Solar or devastated you will perforce
Be perfumed at their tepid passing, and not know
Whether their fragrance brings you joy or woe.
At the moment when your life becomes a total shambles
You will have to resume your hopeless rambles
You have left everything behind and you still are eligible
And all alone, as the gulf becomes unbridgeable
You will have to earn your daily bread
Although you feel you’d be better off dead.
They’ll hurt you, and you’d like to put up some resistance
Because you know that your very existence
Depends on others as unworthy of you
As you are of God, and when it’s
time to review
Your wrongs, you will feel no pain, they will seem like a joke
For you will have ceased to suffer under their yoke.
Whether you pass through fields, towns or across the sea
You will always retain your melancholy
And look after it; you will have to think of your career
Not live it, as in a game where the best player
Is he who forgets himself, and cannot say
What spurs him on, and makes him win the day.
When weary henceforth of wishing to gaze
At the sinuous path of your strung-out days
You return to the place where your stables used to tower
You will find nothing left but some fetid manure
Your steeds beneath other horsemen will have fled
To autumn’s far country, all rusted and red.
Like an ardent rose in the September sun
You will feel the flesh sag from your limbs, one by one,
Less of you than of a pruned rosebush will remain,
That spring lies in wait for, to clothe once again.
If you wish to love you won’t know whom to choose
There are none whose love you’d be sorry to lose
Not to love at all would be the better part
Lest another seize and confiscate your heart.
When evening descends on your deserted routes
You won’t be afraid and will say, “What boots
It to worry and fret? To rail at my luck?
Since time my actions like an apple will pluck.”
You would like of yourself to curtail certain features
That you dislike, making allowances for this creature,
Giving that other one a chance to show his fettle,
Confining yet another behind bars of metal:
That rebel will soon become an armèd titan.
Then let yourself love all that you take delight in
Accept yourself whole, accept the heritage
That shaped you and is passed on from age to age
Down to your entity. Remain mysterious;
Rather than be pure, accept yourself as numerous.
The wave of heredity will not be denied:
Best, then, on a lover’s silken breast to abide
And be wafted by her to Nirvana’s blue shoals
Where the self is abolished and renounces its goals.
In you all things must live and procreate
Forget about the harvest and its sheaves of wheat
You are the harvest and not the reaper
And of your domain another is the keeper.
When you see the lapsed dreams that childhood invents
