Can You Hear, Bird: Poems

by John Ashbery

like a birdhouse or dishwasher, that we came to terms with

  eons ago, when a tsunami of slime collided

  with our pink stucco skyscraper. We know so much we’ve

  kept it all in. That may be changing.

  In an Inchoate Place

  I

  Is there another person you would like me to invite?

  I shall, you know,

  if only for the exquisite confusion it causes in you,

  like a rope of starfish, tonight.

  Opinion is divided on the merits of the majority of the guests.

  The siblings are standardized but substandard:

  red tadpoles lisping.

  II

  They are all free to come and go as they please

  through the vanilla-flavored Venetian blinds.

  In Old Oklahoma

  A tad triste I too found it,

  along with other November matters that need not

  concern us here. But what’s wrong with here? Suffice it

  to say baroque street gangs were breaking up

  thanks to the same principles that oversaw their gestation.

  A meaningless scuffle or shuffle ensued.

  One wondered which stamps were licked, what tea poured

  from on high as negative celebration

  of all that is lost to us now, and all that is to come—

  mysterious hybrids, most likely, veined purple pods

  growing out of control to no one’s detriment—I insist

  on that. And then it rained fat rabbits—I

  should have listened to my dog. In all,

  another pleasant institution, like so many

  pavilions that asterisk the harbor rim.

  In all my life it was my twentieth birthday,

  she came over; the night is all stuttering

  orange flares and fig-colored queries

  in the margin—it starts like this. It’s breathless

  and out of hope, a quartet for someone

  semantics will never graze, nor the idling,

  puny zephyrs, the last saviors one thinks of

  looking to. Old Mother Hubbard knew nothing of pain

  that flows as fondly as conversation among acquaintances,

  and as discreetly.

  Like a Sentence

  How little we know,

  and when we know it!

  It was prettily said that “No man

  hath an abundance of cows on the plain, nor shards

  in his cupboard.” Wait! I think I know who said that! It was …

  Never mind dears, the afternoon

  will fold you up, along with preoccupations

  that now seem so important, until only a child

  running around on a unicycle occupies center stage.

  Then what will you make of walls? And I fear you

  will have to come up with something,

  be it a terraced gambit above the sea

  or gossip overheard in the marketplace.

  For you see it becomes you to be chastened:

  for the old to envy the young,

  and for youth to fear not getting older,

  where the paths through the elms, the carnivals, begin.

  And it was said of Gyges that his ring

  attracted those who saw him not,

  just as those who wandered through him were aware

  only of a certain stillness, such as precedes an earache,

  while lumberjacks in headbands came down to see what all the fuss was about,

  whether it was something they could be part of

  sans affront to self-esteem.

  And those temple hyenas who had seen enough,

  nostrils aflare, fur backing up in the breeze,

  were no place you could count on

  having taken a proverbial powder

  as rifle butts received another notch.

  I, meanwhile … I was going to say I had squandered spring

  when summer came along and took it from me

  like a terrier a lady has asked one to hold for a moment

  while she adjusts her stocking in the mirror of a weighing machine.

  But here it is winter, and wrong

  to speak of other seasons as though they exist.

  Time only has an agenda

  in that wallet at his back, while we

  who think we know where we are going unfazed

  end up in brilliant woods, nourished more than we can know

  by the unexpectedness of ice and stars

  and crackling tears. We’ll just have to make a go of it,

  a run for it. And should the smell of baking cookies appease

  one or the other of the olfactory senses, climb down

  into this wagonload of prisoners.

  The meter will be screamingly clear then,

  the rhythms unbounced, for though we came

  to life as to a school, we must leave it without graduating

  even as an ominous wind puffs out the sails

  of proud feluccas who don’t know where they’re headed,

  only that a motion is etched there, shaking to be free.

  Limited Liability

  And one wants to know everything about everything.

  Such is my decision, though I will abide by others,

  that goes without saying. Still, I fell off the sandbar

  walking back toward shore, and that was a time of sorrow,

  even of great sorrow, for myself and many others.

  No, make that a few others. Whatever I was

  trying to do automatically broke the hearts

  of those in the seats on either side of mine.

  It was wild like weather, yet you couldn’t just live in it,

  you had to drool, your facial muscles had to twitch,

  at least some of them. About the time the thought

  of living in England occurs, and one succeeds in eating a

  little asparagus and custard, the old guard revives its dug-in

  positions. You knew about these. They were like lace and spring,

  they went away but they never really did. They require a context

  of mourning, and public relations. If a cock is being sucked

  at a certain moment, it will not jiggle the seismograph, provoke regret

  from one who is esteemed and dry, but rather break out disjunctedly

  in another hemisphere, and people will start reasoning

  from there on. The kid was only a gas-station attendant;

  he couldn’t have been more than seventeen or eighteen, yet the evening

  wind begins promptly to blow, the morbid goddesses sing

  that a brooch came undone and pricked one’s finger, all silently:

  so much for revanchisme. “But of course.” And like it says here,

  cooperation is part of the school of things, only don’t get too close

  to overboard, and be burned by the musing that sets in then.

  Is that why cows live in clusters, why the foxglove

  covers for the hay, and all gets done in a day like it was

  supposed to, only there are no more feet to bathe?

  I confess I was leery

  the first time she told her story

  but having heard it enough I can never get enough of what it was determined

  should never be shielded from the rain or its attendant wetness;

  by the same token they are always with us. Once I started

  to count the ways I was indebted to the moose and its house

  of night, some old saw had me battling again, kicking up moss

  and letting it settle along with other debris. No

  one saw me when I came here; I swear it. You can have a handle

  on me now, only don’t abuse it

  too much yet. The sky popped out of the oven

  like a tin of blueberry muffins, and there’s so much to say.

  Only I don’t feel I’m dry enough. Yet. Take t
en,

  there’s a good caddy. Go do someone’s bidding,

  then meet me under the larch when the storm crackles. I’ll tell you then.

  Love in Boots

  Our first assignment was to make a square,

  a place for living and carping in,

  where the Sphinx could panhandle and maids desist,

  if they cared to.

  It seems my plan was too perfect!

  People ended up hating it and the lives they lived in.

  Back to the bogs! But the way was cut off,

  or no one quite remembered it. It should be here,

  somewhere …

  In these demotic times one is grateful for a variety

  of sundries: footprints on the prow of a ship,

  or a wolf taking the trouble to cross over and tell you

  he’s engaged. Sunny things, the fins and buttons of childhood,

  passing through grace and beyond it.

  One finds there is time, after all, to wind the clock.

  Yet no one noticed it had stopped. Would it make

  the afternoon editions, blowing like mold across the blue

  canyons we call our trellis, causing alembics to burst

  in carnival sheds? What about next time? Could we eliminate it

  from the list of essentials taxpayers pray for,

  then shrink from, noticing it reflected in the rain barrel

  when all the other dimensions remain quietly on hold?

  Perhaps, on some more sophisticated planet,

  these things tow the gravity they require,

  and people are no match for them, don’t even envy

  or imagine them. Everything proceeds from a simple

  gesture that never goes out of style. Yoo hoo. Look, it’s Clara

  and Amos. Aren’t they simply divine? But it is getting late,

  and I have to get up and chop wood tomorrow. Oh, if you’re looking

  for a timetable, it’s there, in that train, that’s now

  two feet away, now one, but will never obstruct

  or demolish us. Thank heaven for Zeno’s paradox!

  Love’s Stratagem

  The comparison says enough, really, nay is eloquent on the subject

  of Paris furs, how she descended the avenue

  wondering what was wrong, or warm. The best comparison

  I can give you is two heads. His head literally exploded,

  mine felt like a grape that prudent fingers leave on the bunch

  to cloud over and legally pass out of the picture.

  Yet his face it resembles a fig.

  Where can I find seeds in heaven? I want to take some back to earth with me

  and plant them if it’s illegal. Imagine the surprised cackling!

  My bedsores have healed! I just hit a hole in one!

  My Labrador just had twins, and I don’t know where to register them!

  I replaced a file with a file

  so asps wouldn’t eat it. Now that we are out in the fun you must run

  farther than any salmon bringing milt home to meet the missus.

  Only say, if we are categorically united,

  how many rooms does that make? Does one count the bathroom

  or the patio, if it’s enclosed? (We’ll have to make a run for it, don’t

  let on you know anything about Sheba.) Er, where was I?

  I know. I can see it now that the fog has evaporated

  and taken most of the town with it. Come to think of it,

  why did we settle here? Did God ordain it? Why couldn’t we have

  gone on just hanging around the window seat, head out the window,

  eyes drooping, tongue lolling? Or were we meant to discover

  the boiling point of Minnesota, the town in Nebraska?

  Many Are Dissatisfied

  yet the wind from Seattle blows over and over,

  against the facing page and against the anthill.

  You would wonder at all the crumbs

  that have been dropped, lest you find your way

  through this tangled story of ours,

  and at how the gentlemen fliers cursed us

  as mere entertainers, made us put our wallets away.

  There was nothing they wouldn’t do to make us comfortable,

  short of approving our lifestyle.

  Which is why I fester on the porch,

  a Hun without a regiment, till the great pretender

  comes to knock us over.

  It was so gray and mild,

  the evening we played air hockey, that I could hardly

  condone your singing. You thought about your neighbor’s come,

  listlessly, as a child with a slinky badgers cardoons,

  while in the great specialist’s plaid-paneled waiting room

  the air has gone mad.

  My question to you now is: How

  do we escape the fat boy, in lemon overalls,

  twenty stories high, with feet two blocks in diameter?

  I guess it was just that spring

  emptied like an Egyptian sewer into the street,

  fringing our losses before the bad time that went away.

  Or is it all declamation—the wanting

  to sue nature for the tide’s infirmities,

  sliding off into a lather,

  mouthing the old pulchritude a house has?

  Military Pastoral

  Hello, blubberface. You can come in now.

  No, I didn’t say now. What are you, My Man Godfrey?

  Now go out and come in gently. What

  had we asked you to bring? Or was it only

  to show off reentering a different way?

  In any case my apples are blasted.

  This tin screen grates on my ear.

  Asked back, over the tides and mangrove hummocks

  of last year at this exact same time—

  kind of makes you feel younger, doesn’t it, buttocks,

  if you’re really in the mood for improvement?

  But my pale army subsists on what it can scrounge

  from the larders of thrifty paysannes.

  All around me I see only hope and dopiness

  etched against a sky of ferule tan, of so much incongruity

  they fall slap in the middle of village streets.

  And when I, vanguard of mortality, review my troops

  it’s as if the moisture had evaporated from the air.

  I say one, two, twelve times. Only the thrush hears

  and appreciates the humor of the saga, but of course

  the cat already has its eye on her. We only learn from books,

  I suppose, and partly hidden tattoos that tell of sunken treasure

  and other boundless efforts that are required of no man.

  Might as well unpack the laurels—they’re starting to arrive.

  My Name Is Dimitri

  I am going to be your host tonight.

  Do you wish the fiddle or the fish?

  The hen with ivory sauce is very fine, very light.

  An experience unlike any other pushes you

  toward what holy extremities? To a margin of uncertainty

  where not just drinks are muddled and an old frump

  of a past straddles you. Uncertainty polishes the china

  to a mirrorlike daze.

  A World War I soldier wants to say Thank you,

  Fuck you, from all the trenches his heart is bleeding

  from, from the aghast question and the problem of novelty

  to the tip of sores that ends this peninsula

  back where it began, where the pilgrims trod.

  There is so much in Warsaw—

  too many restaurants, too few connections

  that would otherwise make things interesting.

  We have nothing to cling to, only torn memories

  of a station between stations that wasn’t

  the one that was supposed to be there. An altar of r
oses

  climbed halfway up the stadium which was full of misfits

  with no store to come home to. Still, there was the bus,

  a place beyond all others, curdled in the neat sky.

  An insane child wishes the grass whipped less

  at the bends where the posts are. The merger of innocents

  matters less than the hum of interim authority and the screech of descants

  that take you by surprise as they tide you over.

  Goodnight. The windscreen is heavy with imagery

  in entranced colors like the plumes of a canary

  or lyrebird. Keep the rats out of that granary

  and all will be well for a century, but if the mailman

  leaves me no mail it will be a vast appointed mistake,

  vast as a throne room in an old castle by the sea,

  as Thuringia. The moss grew for me, and there

  the matter rested, in salt pits and other geographical refuse.

  Besides, they were coming over the ridge,

  would save us, and then we’d see what we would see—

  despondent daughters of the Hellespont, fickle as creation

  and the lives that extend it down to this trough.

  My Philosophy of Life

  Just when I thought there wasn’t room enough

  for another thought in my head, I had this great idea—

  call it a philosophy of life, if you will. Briefly,

  it involved living the way philosophers live,

  according to a set of principles. OK, but which ones?

  That was the hardest part, I admit, but I had a

  kind of dark foreknowledge of what it would be like.

  Everything, from eating watermelon or going to the bathroom

  or just standing on a subway platform, lost in thought

  for a few minutes, or worrying about rain forests,

  would be affected, or more precisely, inflected

  by my new attitude. I wouldn’t be preachy,

  or worry about children and old people, except

  in the general way prescribed by our clockwork universe.

  Instead I’d sort of let things be what they are

  while injecting them with the serum of the new moral climate

  I thought I’d stumbled into, as a stranger

  accidentally presses against a panel and a bookcase slides back,

  revealing a winding staircase with greenish light

  somewhere down below, and he automatically steps inside