by John Ashbery
who knows what will jump out of it?
Some other passports were issued. Pilgrims
with scrip and staffs lined the stairwell and the near reaches of the street
in the moony swell that always seems to take over there, at a certain point
when I’m far from you. That’s the message of it all—
of life, even.
You say you shied away from every event
in our small house. Yet at the end it turned sociable;
there was a breeze in the flags that they noticed
and one felt like running toward some inescapable doom, just for the fun of it.
Some were on vacation, a busman’s holiday
they called it, and would have it no other way. Gradually my hands readjusted
to the stitchery in the tablecloth. If it was going to be this way, why
not pass the wine around again. Hoist up your stocking
to where the emerald stickpin has pierced it, a joy
for all to see. Say, I suddenly realized I want
to be you along for the ride. Why not? And the breeze
is cool.
You see, in your pharmacopeia of battered notions
just the right things prevail. A man is his house. Two naked girls
are in tubetops. Fun to see. A lazy susan spins round again:
What has it brought you this time?
Are there going to be summer suckers?
What’ll be the big surprise?
Good news. The universe has been challenged again
by a schoolboy in South Orange. And oh yes,
long division has come out on top.
To see you the way you go this way
is to know the marvelous state of tulips in this our parkway.
What goes around comes around. The medicine dropper approached the sky.
This will soon cure that.
So wonderful you could see us again.
FLOATINGLY
Kill the white beaches, the hotel, bugs!
The crumbs on a table sang this song to insulate themselves,
but the chickens merely pecked harder. We do, we don’t, we do, we do mean
to vacuum these crumbs, unless someday an idiot boy
pass through the wood on his way to the ballpark,
tossing his cap unassumingly, for what is, in fact, a gesture?
It is only a gesture. So, sure, morons
can be on your side of the spleen fence: It’s only gurus
matter to outsiders, after all, the lame girl said.
She spoke, and I averred:
No one who has known this beach can undo the righteousness that begat it
out of sand, close to a fence.
By the same token, one needs two tin cans.
And let the browsers beware, she famously
ad-libbed, for chickens are like jurists in at least one sense:
Neither is wanted when the old line undulates,
shrieking its core across water.
No saffron impediment to evening’s fine-sanded
elliptical body,
for the presence of a mote is always singular.
Towheaded ideas learn from and are transformed by them.
We have only too much lettuce, lettuce to give away.
Our fronds shall not know us
nor apocryphal lectures train us to eye the side aisles.
TENEBRAE
For a little snow you get your asking price:
the Ace of Wounds, star of tubs, brushfires
from there to here like an afterthought,
and this suddenly not all that you willed it to be.
We marched in different directions.
Once a week there’s a very big field day.
Plant two skyscrapers. Then the moat will be less
unexpected. It’s coming round to you again;
indeed, it dances. And in this starting to be something
something disappears, but a shine prevails.
And they don’t pay attention,
and they don’t pay attention, that’s all I can say.
See what the prisoners of war are all about.
How close are you? Rocks seep into the night
and the clay gets the attention it deserves.
We build and build our shadow-pulpit,
then seize morning when it comes,
in chirrupy stride: names of the lost ships,
lasting until today, until nostalgia sets in. We’re home
in what passes for a city in America (are the streets
laughing at us?). We can’t drive yet,
or even walk.
And one is given the run of the land.
OUTSIDE MY WINDOW THE JAPANESE…
Outside my window the Japanese driving range
shivers in its mesh veils, skinny bride
of soon-to-be-spring, ravenous, rapturous. Why is it here?
A puzzle. And what was it doing before, then? An earlier
puzzle. I like how it wraps itself
in not-quite wind—
sure enough,
the time is up. What else do you have in your hand?
Open your hand, please. My elder seraph
just woke up, is banging the coffee-pot lid
into place. See! the coffee flows
crazily to its nest, the doldrums are awake,
jumping up and down on tiptoe, night-blindness ended.
And from where you stand,
how many possible equations does it spell out?
My hair’s just snoring back.
The coprophagic earth yields another of its
minute reasons, turns to a quivering mush,
recovers, staggers to its feet, touches the sky
with its yardstick, walks back to the place of received,
enthusiastic entities. Another year … And if we had known last spring
what the buildings knew then, what defeat, it would have turned to mud
all the same in us, waved us down the escalator,
past the counter with free samples of fudge, to where the hostess stands.
This was never my idea, shards, she says. This
is where the anonymous donors carved their initials in my book,
to be a puzzle for jaycees to come, as a nesting-ground
is to an island. Oh, we’d waddle
often, there, stepping in and out of the boat
as though nobody knew what time it was, or cared
which lid the horizon was. We’d get to know
each other in time, and till then it was all a camp meeting, hail-
fellow-well-met, and the barstools
reflected the ceiling’s gummy polish, to the starboard
where purple kings sit, and it was too late for today,
the newspapers had already been printed, telling their tale
along avenues, husks of driftwood
washed ashore again and again, speechless, spun out of control.
What a gorgeous sunset, cigarette case, how tellingly
the coiled rope is modelled, what perfume
in that sound of thunder, invisible! And you wonder
why I came back? Perhaps this will refresh your memory,
skateboard, roller skates, the binomial theorem picked out in
brutish, swabbed gasps. All the way to the escape clause
he kept insisting he’d done nothing wrong, and then—pouf!—it was
curtains for him and us, excepting these splinters
of our perpetual remainder, reminder
of all those days to come, and those others, so far back
in the mothering past.
ANY OTHER TIME
A couple of shivers of attitude
ago the ship coasted out of sight
to its life in rain.
More morbid mongrels munching
and the news from over there clouds
the hockey pageant’s despe
rate coda,
that shakes with the glitter of edges, of the steep
vocabulary that’s coming …
All around us fires
are trained at the center, neatest thing
that ever happened. I’ll bye-bye you
in blue
if it’s the last thing we do.
So we say: Someone had an urge, a whim,
and lightning began there. On all
roads we merely trespass, finding a level,
store-bought thing. Like buying a grapefruit
and having it displayed. Yes and we have teas,
boots for the sore, beds for the weary,
a whole warehouse full of notions,
and this. Makes you kinda comfy.
The less said the more we’ll shut up about it—
on the cusp, actually.
Probably Based On A Dream
Like you’ve done it before—
Are you working hard? Hello? Mrs. Grizzli?
Only the happy few know what keeps us
from ballooning into our strength. And when we try
to capture wisps from the rocket,
sinking in the hay, there are those who tell you
to come again another day,
that the past is soiled and forgotten. Yet neither
you nor I know what happens in the thud
of cannon threatening to take off with the wild ducks
thunderously, and you, if I’m not
mistaken, were around here once, once too often
the landlady tells me. Quick! Where is
your whoop? How unexpectedly have we arrived? In a brusque mountain
workshop where tankas are forged, and the truth comes
unsliced, like bread, the captains and the pageants err and repeat;
for nothing all along was it?
But someday, I know, my idol will slip me a pill
for as long as bunkers repeat themselves. Alyssa?
Shovel the maps into the diving helmet.
The press cuttings have come to grief;
wind slaps the high buildings.
You too know Kokomo, O unpreceded one.
THE VILLAGE OF SLEEP
Why, we must dye it then—
Would I like to stay here indefinitely?
We have trees to prune, cryptograms to decode,
it was all a blind running into the light—
She couldn’t say the word for “fish.” Nor are his genes undone
by what oafish submarines remain. Aye, sir,
Captain Nemo, sir, we’ve spotted the junk
in the roads up ahead. What! That spasm I created for my own diversion, now
it’s clearly emerging out of the octopus drool that so long enshrouded it,
while I, a nether spur to its district railway, am overrun with
coughing doubt for the duration, yet here I must stand,
a seeming enigma. Outside, life prattles on merrily,
like an embroidered towel, and would probably be too weak to object
if we decided to postpone the picnic until November.
I hear you; the arches under the embankment
are part of what I’m all about. I too was weaned from excess
in some silvery age now lost in a blizzard of envelopes.
How frostily jingle the harness bells!
It’s all we can do to keep up with the dunce’s velocipede,
while in a neutral corner of the quarry
the same binge of history is conning men’s eyes
into dogged superstition. So we must make sport of it,
reel in our catch while yet there’s time, but droplets
are exploding in the gutter. The gambling ship ferried us away
past larkspur, past concertinas, and the old name became visible again,
briefly, on the building’s dusty façade. I
thought we’d lost you. No,
I’m still here.
Do you want to jump out a shy window?
Little by little one took in the foxes’ keening:
It’s all right, it’s sober,
they chortled. This was just a plant,
it counts only for the next time,
and we in beach goggles, brilliant suspenders … The party beast
in me says let’s abandon, cooler heads say dive,
dive like a frog while famous night is coming on
like the blistered exterior of a sigh.
IN MY HEAD
I walk out over the moors, the hills, the sand valleys.
My head is listless. The wind is scrubbing the stars.
Yet I don’t detonate. There is too much land behind me.
Birds sang it once, then not so much anymore.
I am striving to be late, and to kiss a fish.
It would be a greater one who came back
to the ghost frontier.
She wrote on this.
They all taste pretty much the same,
cut flowers, as I was semen in someone’s mouth, an avalanche of whorls.
What next for me? Not to be the first one there.
And the wind rattles its scarecrow bones in the living
room, the spring came apart in disorder,
all over the rug. The landsman, he must care,
came too, the others joying his renewal, his removal
as in an old dump truck on the fortieth mile of the road.
Seafaring, the faring, and pickling,
so many admonitions to the Great Lout
who watches over us. He must have approved. In the dimness …
THE SPACIOUS FIRMAMENT
Say that this is a street therefore people walk down it.
I stand holding a bunch of keys,
burn up my motto, read Kleist in November.
Can it be that I cannibalize others’ lives,
the lives of others’ words?
Or am I simply going back to where I came from,
not too long ago, to excuse whoever took my place
when I was gone? Sudden indecision,
dear reddish flowers—I am about a comma in space.
I neither go nor return unfazed.
In short I am this comedy you wrote for me to star in.
Yes she waits, time out, time in,
for me to get the wail, whale of a wail, off my chest.
Yes the coddling circuits
that baited
the time giveaway
are standing all over me too like foxglove angels,
drawing in their breath, giving us what we bargained for—
no crossing, chumps at the end of the market
where needle soldiers ferreted us out,
wished us well, taking a piss at a private hall about
a mile down the road,
coming in during the week.
They had put their kilts on first.
Pull you out of my wool,
toiling as the will
bends us to ends and now is no more.
That force going under,
it kind of makes it stand out
and for me too the trees in this room
we bide our time in, happy as in a nursery,
till the times dictate otherwise. Oh, he was a grown man,
scrofulous it’s true, but neither piebald nor land-proud.
A great equator did him in, the fullness of time
waited at the end of my hall, cobbled quodlibets,
procession toward a context. Capitalist
actions forced it into a runoff.
Model villages provide all sorts of
plumbing. Cherry blossoms cascade
in spring, don’t last long.
I think we shall be moving to
the dance baths on the river, river that is ripe,
right for explication, as you do plaster it with the wasps
just coming into being, no names yet.
Twenty years ago my dance profes
sor
reinterpreted it, we’ll have it on the ground soon
he said coming back, my hand blotted with crystals, your breath calls.
No, something to lug up behind the office at noon.
PROXIMITY
It was great to see you the other day
at the carnival. My enchiladas were delicious,
and I hope that yours were too.
I wanted to fulfill your dream of me
in some suitable way. Giving away my new gloves,
for instance, or putting a box around all that’s wrong with us.
But these gutta-percha lamps do not whisper on our behalf.
Now sometimes in the evenings, I am lonely
with dread. A rambunctious wind fills the pine
at my doorstep, the woodbine is enchanted,
and I must be off before the clock strikes
whatever hour it is intent on.
Do not leave me in this wilderness!
Or, if you do, pay me to stay behind.
GOING AWAY ANY TIME SOON
I’ll see you in my dreams she said
then they let the gate down
unplugged the coffee
It was time for my annual cure at Wiesbaden
What good are rules anyway
They apply only to themselves and other rules
This rule rules out this other one
The rule of glass, sleek and dark
was poring over my auto-autobiography
like an intensely private person
with hazelnut eyes
When it came time to invent, invest someone or something
you look to the urgent fallen petals
each imbibing its share of life’s mystery
as a cat sips and turns away and sips some more
Little mystery are you good for anything?
No she says I came out in time for school
then went back inside to resist sleep
that is still coming as all my absent years are coming
The slower time speaks the less majestic its tower
the fewer bats warbling to interrupt
whatever domestic tasks we believe we have set ourselves
in a truth that is mostly underground
The settled rhythm revives ancient purposes
What did I think going out
and never a tiny random note creeps back in
but all alone a star weeps, watches in the drizzle
and the four magicians fell down.
One took a train to Pennsylvania.
