by John Ashbery
Salute your adolescence and fold their tents
Virginal, tall and slim beside the jasmine tree
An adorable girl is plaiting tenderly
The bouquet of love, which will stick in your memory
As the final vision and the final story.
Henceforth you will burn with lascivious fire
Accursèd passion will strum its lyre
At the charming crossroads where day is on the wane
As the curve of a hill dissolves in a plain.
The tacit beauty of the sacred plateau
Will be spoiled for you and you will never know
Henceforth the peace a pious heart bestows
To the soul its gentle sister in whom it echoes;
Anxiety will have called everything into question
And you will be tempted to the wildest actions.
Then let all fade at the edge of our days!
No God emerges to dream our destinies.
The days depart, only boredom does not retreat
It’s like a path that flies beneath one’s feet
Whose horizon shifts while as we trudge
The dust and mud stick to us and do not budge.
In vain do we speak, provoke actions or think,
We are prisoners of the world’s demented sink.
The soft enchantments of our years of innocence
Are harvested by accredited experience
Our fondest memories soon turn to poison
And only oblivion remains in season.
When, beside a window, one feels evening prevail
Who is there who can receive its slanting veil
And not regret day that bore it on its stream
Whether day was joy or under evil’s regime
Drawing us to the one and deploring the other
Regretting the departure of all our brothers
And all that made the day, including its stains.
Whoever you may be O man who complains
Not at your destiny, can you then doubt,
When the moment arrives for you to stretch out,
That remorse, a stinking jackal with subtle nose,
Will come at the end to devour your repose?
… Something gentle and something sad eftsoons
In the flanks of our pale and realistic noons
Holds with our soul a discourse without end
The curtain rises on the afternoon wind
Day sheds its leaves and now will soon be gone
And already my adulthood seems to mourn
Beside the reddish sunsets of the hollow vase
As gently it starts to deepen and slowly to increase.
Young Man with Letter
Another feeble, wonderful creature is making the rounds again,
In this phraseology we become, as clouds like leaves
Fashion the internal structure of a season
From water into ice. Such an abstract can be
Dazed waking of the words with no memory of what happened before,
Waiting for the second click. We know them well enough now,
Forever, from living into them, tender, frivolous and puzzled
And we know that with them we will come out right.
But a new question poses itself:
Is it we who are being transformed?
The light in the hallway seems to indicate it
And the corrosive friends whose breath is so close
It whistles, are changed to tattered pretexts
As a sign, perhaps, that all’s well with us.
Yet the quiet bickering on the edge of morning
That advances to a steady drone by noon
And to hollow rumblings by night: is there so much good then
Blushing beyond the sense of it, standing straight up for others to view?
Is it not more likely that such straining and puffing
As commas produce, this ferment
We take as suddenly our present
Is our waltzing somewhere else, down toward the view
But holding off? The spiked neon answers it
Up against the charged black of a full sky:
“We thought you knew, brothers not ancestors;
Your time has come, has come to stay;
The sieved dark can tell you about it.”
Clouds
All this time he had only been waiting,
Not even thinking, as many had supposed.
Now sleep wound down to him its promise of dazzling peace
And he stood up to assume that imagination.
There were others in the forest as close as he
To caring about the silent outcome, but they had gotten lost
In the shadows of dreams so that the external look
Of the nearby world had become confused with the cobwebs inside.
Yet all would finish at the end, or go undreamed of.
It was a solid light in which a man and woman could kiss
Yet dark and ambiguous as a cloakroom.
No noise was to underline the notion of its being.
Thus the thing grew heavy with the mere curve of being,
As a fruit ripens through the long summer before falling
Out of the idea of existence into the fact of being received,
As many another guest. And the helloes and goodbyes are never stilled;
They stay in the foreground and look back on it.
It was still possible of course to imagine that an era had ended,
Yet this time was marked also by new ideas of progress and decay.
The old ideals had been cast aside and people were restless for the new,
In a wholly different mass, so there was no joining,
Only separate blocks of achievement and opinion
With no relation to the conducive ether
Which surrounded everything like the clear idea of a ruler.
And it was that these finally flattened out or banded together
Through forgetting, into one contemporaneous sea
With no explanations to give. And the small enclave
Of worried continuing began again, putting forth antennae into the night.
How do we explain the harm, feeling
We are always the effortless discoverers of our career,
With each day digging the grave of tomorrow and at the same time
Preparing its own redemption, constantly living and dying?
How can we outsmart the sense of continuity
That eludes our steps as it prepares us
For ultimate wishful thinking once the mind has ended
Since this last thought both confines and uplifts us?
He was like a lion tracking its prey
Through days and nights, forgetful
In the delirium of arrangements.
The birds fly up out of the underbrush,
The evening swoons out of contaminated dawns,
And now whatever goes farther must be
Alien and healthy, for death is here and knowable.
Out of touch with the basic unhappiness
He shoots forward like a malignant star.
The edges of the journey are ragged.
Only the face of night begins to grow distinct
As the fainter stars call to each other and are lost.
Day re-creates his image like a snapshot:
The family and the guests are there,
The talking over there, only now it will never end.
And so cities are arranged, and oceans traversed,
And farms tilled with especial care.
This year again the corn has grown ripe and tall.
It is a perfect rebuttal of the argument. And Semele
Moves away, puzzled at the brown light above the fields.
The Bungalows
Impatient as we were for all of them to join us,
The land had not yet risen into view: gulls had swept the gray steel towers
away
So that it profited less to go searching, away over the humming earth
Than to stay in immediate relation to these other things—boxes, store parts, whatever you wanted to call them—
Whose installedness was the price of further revolutions, so you knew this combat was the last.
And still the relationship waxed, billowed like scenery on the breeze.
They are the same aren’t they,
The presumed landscape and the dream of home
Because the people are all homesick today or desperately sleeping,
Trying to remember how those rectangular shapes
Became so extraneous and so near
To create a foreground of quiet knowledge
In which youth had grown old, chanting and singing wise hymns that
Will sign for old age
And so lift up the past to be persuaded, and be put down again.
The warning is nothing more than an aspirate “h”;
The problem is sketched completely, like fireworks mounted on poles:
Complexion of evening, the accurate voices of the others.
During Coca-Cola lessons it becomes patent
Of noise on the left, and we had so skipped a stage that
The great wave of the past, compounded in derision,
Submerged idea and non-dreamer alike
In falsetto starlight like “purity”
Of design that had been the first danger sign
To wash the sticky, icky stuff down the drain—pfui!
How does it feel to be outside and inside at the same time,
The delicious feeling of the air contradicting and secretly abetting
The interior warmth? But land curdles the dismay in which it’s written
Bearing to a final point of folly and doom
The wisdom of these generations.
Look at what you’ve done to the landscape—
The ice cube, the olive—
There is a perfect tri-city mesh of things
Extending all the way along the river on both sides
With the end left for thoughts on construction
That are always turning to alps and thresholds
Above the tide of others, feeding a European moss rose without glory.
We shall very soon have the pleasure of recording
A period of unanimous tergiversation in this respect
And to make that pleasure the greater, it is worth while
At the risk of tedious iteration, to put first upon record a final protest:
Rather decaying art, genius, inspiration to hold to
An impossible “calque” of reality, than
“The new school of the trivial, rising up on the field of battle,
A thing of sludge and leaf-mold,” and life
Goes trickling out through the holes, like water through a sieve,
All in one direction.
You who were directionless, and thought it would solve everything if you found one,
What do you make of this? Just because a thing is immortal
Is that any reason to worship it? Death, after all, is immortal.
But you have gone into your houses and shut the doors, meaning
There can be no further discussion.
And the river pursues its lonely course
With the sky and the trees cast up from the landscape
For green brings unhappiness—le vert porte malheur.
“The chartreuse mountain on the absinthe plain
Makes the strong man’s tears tumble down like rain.”
All this came to pass eons ago.
Your program worked out perfectly. You even avoided
The monotony of perfection by leaving in certain flaws:
A backward way of becoming, a forced handshake,
An absent-minded smile, though in fact nothing was left to chance.
Each detail was startlingly clear, as though seen through a magnifying glass,
Or would have been to an ideal observer, namely yourself—
For only you could watch yourself so patiently from afar
The way God watches a sinner on the path to redemption,
Sometimes disappearing into valleys, but always on the way,
For it all builds up into something, meaningless or meaningful
As architecture, because planned and then abandoned when completed,
To live afterwards, in sunlight and shadow, a certain amount of years.
Who cares about what was there before? There is no going back,
For standing still means death, and life is moving on,
Moving on towards death. But sometimes standing still is also life.
The Chateau Hardware
It was always November there. The farms
Were a kind of precinct; a certain control
Had been exercised. The little birds
Used to collect along the fence.
It was the great “as though,” the how the day went,
The excursions of the police
As I pursued my bodily functions, wanting
Neither fire nor water,
Vibrating to the distant pinch
And turning out the way I am, turning out to greet you.
Sortes Vergilianae
You have been living now for a long time and there is nothing you do not know.
Perhaps something you read in the newspaper influenced you and that was very frequently.
They have left you to think along these lines and you have gone your own way because you guessed that
Under their hiding was the secret, casual as breath, betrayed for the asking.
Then the sky opened up, revealing much more than any of you were intended to know.
It is a strange thing how fast the growth is, almost as fast as the light from polar regions
Reflected off the arctic ice-cap in summer. When you know where it is heading
You have to follow it, though at a sadly reduced rate of speed,
Hence folly and idleness, raging at the confines of some miserable sunlit alley or court.
It is the nature of these people to embrace each other, they know no other kind but themselves.
Things pass quickly out of sight and the best is to be forgotten quickly
For it is wretchedness that endures, shedding its cancerous light on all it approaches:
Words spoken in the heat of passion, that might have been retracted in good time,
All good intentions, all that was arguable. These are stilled now, as the embrace in the hollow of its flux
And can never be revived except as perverse notations on an indisputable state of things,
As conduct in the past, vanished from the reckoning long before it was time.
Lately you’ve found the dull fevers still inflict their round, only they are unassimilable
Now that newness or importance has worn away. It is with us like day and night,
The surge upward through the grade school positioning and bursting into soft gray blooms
Like vacuum-cleaner sweepings, the opulent fuzz of our cage, or like an excited insect
In nervous scrimmage for the head, etching its none-too-complex ordinances into the matter of the day.
Presently all will go off satisfied, leaving the millpond bare, a site for new picnics,
As they came, naked, to explore all the possible grounds on which exchanges could be set up.
It is “No Fishing” in modest capital letters, and getting out from under the major weight of the thing
As it was being indoctrinated and dropped, heavy as a branch with apples,
And as it started to sigh, just before tumbling into your lap, chagrined and satisfied at the same time,
Knowing its day over and your patience only beginning, toward what marvels of speculation, auscultation, world-view,
Satisfied with the entourage. It is this blank carcass of whims and tentative afterthoughts
&n
bsp; Which is being delivered into your hand like a letter some forty-odd years after the day it was posted.
Strange, isn’t it, that the message makes some sense, if only a relative one in the larger context of message-receiving
That you will be called to account for just as the purpose of it is becoming plain,
Being one and the same with the day it set out, though you cannot imagine this.
There was a time when the words dug in, and you laughed and joked, accomplice
Of all the possibilities of their journey through the night and the stars, creature
Who looked to the abandonment of such archaic forms as these, and meanwhile
Supported them as the tools that made you. The rut became apparent only later
And by then it was too late to check such expansive aspects as what to do while waiting
For the others to show: unfortunately no pile of tattered magazines was in evidence,
Such dramas sleeping below the surface of the everyday machinery; besides
Quality is not given to everybody, and who are you to have been supposing you had it?
So the journey grew ever slower; the battlements of the city could now be discerned from afar
But meanwhile the water was giving out and malaria had decimated their ranks and undermined their morale,
You know the story, so that if turning back was unthinkable, so was victorious conquest of the great brazen gates.
Best perhaps to fold up right here, but even that was not to be granted.
Some days later in the pulsating of orchestras someone asked for a drink:
The music stopped and those who had been confidently counting the rhythms grew pale.
This is just a footnote, though a microcosmic one perhaps, to the greater curve
Of the elaboration; it asks no place in it, only insertion hors-texte as the invisible notion of how that day grew
From planisphere to heaven, and what part in it all the “I” had, the insatiable researcher of learned trivia, bookworm,
And one who marched along with, “made common cause,” yet had neither the gumption nor the desire to trick the thing into happening,
Only long patience, as the star climbs and sinks, leaving illumination to the setting sun.
Fragment
The last block is closed in April. You
See the intrusions clouding over her face
As in the memory given you of older
Permissiveness which dies in the
Falling back toward recondite ends,
