by John Ashbery
The American Screwball Comedy.
Scenes of Clerical Life. Incan Overtures. The House on 42nd Street.
The Man in Between. The Man on the Box. The Motor Car.
Rue des Acacias. Elm Street and After.
The Little Red Church. The Hotel District.
I’ll Eat a Mexican. The Heritage of Froth.
The Trojan Comedy. Water to the Fountain. Memoirs of a Hermit Crab.
The Ostrich Succession. Exit Pursued by a Turkey.
In the Pound. The Artist’s Life. On the Beautiful Blue Danube.
Less Is Roar. The Bicyclist. The Father.
FREE NAIL POLISH
Cool enough. Granted,
she has beautiful legs, you know.
Men’s thoughts are continually drawn behind
the apron of her success,
or to the tank top of her access
to the secrets of the great and philosophic,
of the most polite spirits
that invest these semitropic airs.
I need a tragic future to invest in.
Getting no support from others, I—
wait, here it comes along the rails,
a slow train from Podunk, the ironed faces
of the passengers at each window expressing something precise
but nothing in particular.
Yes, the mooing woods around this station are
partly extreme,
and wire fences are deep within
some parts of them. We know not
what they’re for, nor why we snore
at a bug’s trajectory
over the wallpaper’s lilac lozenges.
TILL THE BUS STARTS
“This heart is useless. I must have another.”
—The Bride of Frankenstein
I like napping in transit.
What I ought to do
just sits there. I like
summer—does it like me?
So much cursory wind
with things on its mind—
“No time to worry about it
now,” it—she—says.
In short I like many
dividers of the days
that come near to eavesdrop on our thoughts.
What about gliders?
These, yes, I like these too.
And greened copper things
like things out of the thirties.
I must have one—no,
make that a dozen, all wrapped
fresh, at my address.
And were it but a foozle
schlepping round my ankles
by golly I’d give it the same
treatment all those guys,
years, gave me. You can’t fasten
a suspender stud and not know about it,
how awful they looked,
and when they returned home under trees
nobody said
anything, nobody wanted it.
Still, I’ll go
out in my way, waiting
for yet another vehicle.
It seems strange I read this page before, no,
this whole short story. And what
sirens sing to me now,
cover me with buttons?
THE RIDICULOUS TRANSLATOR’S HOPES
Gracious exertor, but the rooms are small and mean
and so papered over with secrets that even their shape
is uncertain, but it is the shape of the past:
no love, no extra credit, not even civility
from those shades. Do they even see you?
They were so anxious for you to be there,
once, in the playground of what was happening to them.
Messages were bright then, hats undoffed,
manners fresh and cool, like a seasonable day
in early spring. The glancing
rivulets in the gutters struck a note that was a trifle flint-like,
though, and the birds were wary, warier than usual.
It took a man with a cane to magnetize
all those invisible and partly visible crosscurrents,
reluctant, downright sullen, or ones that hadn’t yet had the time
to reflect on what was being set up here: a point,
no more nor less. Instead of trying to kiss you,
I too felt sucked into the ambient animal-revenge scene:
By twos and threes the animals returned, to their cages,
and sat obediently while the trainer barked orders at them.
They, it seemed, had nothing to lose. Nor in all the whitewashed domain
of the present past tense was anyone privy to the secrets
that now make us strong, or tall, and vulnerable
as a bride left waiting at the church, inching backward
to the cliff’s edge as the photographer gets ready to smile.
THE STORY OF NEXT WEEK
Yes, but right reason dictates … Yes, but the wolf is at the door,
nor shall our finding be indexed.
Yes, but life is a circus, a passing show
wherein each may drop his reflection
and so contradict the purpose of a maelstrom:
the urge, the thrust.
And if what others do
finally seems good to you? Why,
the very civility that gilded it
is flaking. Passivity itself’s a hurdle.
So, lost with the unclaimed lottery junk,
uninventoried, you are an heir to anything.
Brightness of purpose counts: Centesimal
victorious flunkeys seemed to grab its tail
yet it defied them with invention.
Stand up, and the rain
will be cold at first in your pockets.
Later, by chance, you’ll discover supper
in the sparkling, empty tavern.
A nice, white bed awaits you;
your passport’s in there too.
A HUNDRED ALBUMS
Acts have been cleaned up.
In the latest compromise
the hip audience mostly understands.
Unpleasantness, strange blips arise,
the nine-bathroom garage.
But where are we to begin again,
and what are we compared to Thee,
as two men scuffle in a checkout line
and a child bends
into the light, her knowledge of innocence
as a death now, name in the register
a gloved hand signs?
For what have we been rescued, if not
to see these and other things
that have no love for us?
For relishing something once done
in secret, and you lose footing further on,
out of the frame,
and everything that proves dimensionless is haggard.
He was something, wasn’t he?
Until everyone has been let in and found sleep
we go his way, profiting
from the glances we get, the attentions to
special mores that are side-splitting.
And no caretaker comes to mulch us
once the ground is frozen,
no pike stabs the secret surface of earth
in time for a vigil of all you see.
The rose in the planetarium
asks for calm QUIET PLEASE can’t you
see the door is leaking embers from that last, crucial light
we’d just stopped by for, like a mug of hot wine,
but it is soup that is being dashed in your face.
Then one day he sat down and wrote that line
that is so beautiful everybody wants to hum it
on this hillside, shoulders locked swaying to
its rhythm and the Master will come forward then,
the being no creation has seen,
perfect as a crowing cock in a ballad
most will have foretold, alas.
What wretch hasn’t tau
ght me that?
A WALTZ DREAM
She wasn’t having one of her strange headaches tonight.
Whose fault is it? For a long time I thought it was mine,
blamed myself for every minor variation in the major upheaval.
Then …
It may have been the grass praying
for renewal, even though it meant their death,
the individual blades, and, as though psychic,
a white light hovered just above the lake’s layer
like a photograph of ectoplasm.
Those are all fakes, aren’t they?
In slow-moving traffic a man acts like he’s going to be hit
by the stream of cars coming at him from both directions.
Like a cookie cutter, a steamroller lops the view off.
There are nine sisters, nine deafening knocks on the door,
nine busboys to be bussed—er, tipped. And in the thievery
of my own dreams I can see the square like a crystal,
the only imaginary thing we were meant to have,
now soiled, turned under
like a frayed shirt collar
a mother stitches for her son who’s away at school,
mindful he may not care, may wear
another’s scarlet and sulfur raiment
just so he take part in the academy fun.
And later, after the twister, slowly
we mixed drinks of the sort
that may be slopped only on script girls, like lemonade.
Who knows what the world’s got up its sleeve
next brunch, as long as you will be a part of me and all what I am doing?
FALLS TO THE FLOOR,
COMES TO THE DOOR
That arrival, a foretaste of which appalls some,
assumed its rightful place as a statistic. “I don’t suppose you …”
“No,” I snapped, “nor at the opera, with the slush outside.
It seems to me a mildewed brick has been planted in my path
that wasn’t there when I last looked … but when was that?
Why keep the charade up, if it matters so little,
like a tiny window or a bit of missing veneer?”
Then I get my hopes up.
So much gets sorted out in coming,
like the spring cleaning you always dreamed of.
What, me? It’s as though an elf on a charger commanded
me to lie on my back, under the tree whose trunk
is swelling, becoming the world, it may be.
And I have galaxies to turn out, into the street,
in knickers, anywhere, so long as they be going …
One reads how another one’s kinsman
has inherited a vast estate in Scotland.
The things that happen to other people! Surely
it was only a minute ago I caught you in a lapsed prayer
that was answered, you said it yourself. I, from this shelf
whence I see no land, not even space, can yet recall
how the ducks danced under their umbrella.
The past was peaches then.
THE LOUNGE
That it was a relief to him, my lord
who pestered me, with lint, with secrets,
always others’ secrets, you knew
already. Two caitiffs were severed
from the trial, like a gordian knot.
That you knew too.
It is so hearty in this lounge.
Some bogus tint tampers
with the prairie sky in the mural,
makes it fresh, immediate, wrong
for these immaculate circumstances.
Then it’s back to the old school, wagers,
brothels soon to come. It could have been settled
way back when so simply. But then there would have been no plot,
no peg to hang a dress on
of gauze the filmiest.
You, I suppose, wanted it this way
because we all want it this way.
Thus the story never gets sugar-coated,
protrudes like a bayonet from a shawl.
If there were others, they never came to see
what the disturbance was about. In fact there was
no disturbance, nothing to slide a hand along,
only postscripts and self-mutilation
the old way: cash and carry,
no refunds.
THE IMPROVEMENT
Is that where it happens?
Only yesterday when I came back, I had this
diaphanous disaffection for this room, for spaces,
for the whole sky and whatever lies beyond.
I felt the eggplant, then the rhubarb.
Nothing seems strong enough for
this life to manage, that sees beyond
into particles forming some kind of entity—
so we get dressed kindly, crazy at the moment.
A life of afterwords begins.
We never live long enough in our lives
to know what today is like.
Shards, smiling beaches,
abandon us somehow even as we converse with them.
And the leopard is transparent, like iced tea.
I wake up, my face pressed
in the dewy mess of a dream. It mattered,
because of the dream, and because dreams are by nature sad
even when there’s a lot of exclaiming and beating
as there was in this one. I want the openness
of the dream turned inside out, exploded
into pieces of meaning by its own unasked questions,
beyond the calculations of heaven. Then the larkspur
would don its own disproportionate weight,
and trees return to the starting gate.
See, our lips bend.
“THE FAVOR OF A REPLY
Is requested.” That’s where is it began—
something like an engagement, with collusion
in its footsteps following. Like the slanted look
in the eyes of old portrait photographs—the three-quarters
view is more than sufficient to tell the ambition,
the dread.
There’s some reality, too, some entertainment
here. Did you see where the couch rests
after dinner, the clearing up, the
white skirts around the house?
No one ever made it up but no one
made it sound better.
They dragged you out after that.
It wasn’t until the leaves were partly rusted,
clashing with the fresh green, that a cover-up
was admitted. By then it was time to get new clothes,
new coals—to adjust. And some are still coping,
the mist still seems to cause them to blush
though it’s only an illusion. After sex
there’s nothing, only a reason,
a table of wearied books. A piece of lace
hung high up in the sky.
A HELD THING
Then he sort of lobbed it
over the fence if you know what I mean.
I do know what you mean
but I shall not tell anyone
about it until all your meaning
is clear to me, that is until it becomes clarity
that sucks us out of the void and across the orchard.
When I was a little teenager
I heard the far-off voices and imagined
them to be cries painted on a canvas.
Each had its own color, or a more vivid
approximation of that color, waiting
to be invited in for tea, or anything,
patted on the head.
I must haul myself down from there—
underbrush too thick with communion.
We’ve a million reasons for eccentric behavior
or even outright madness—you have only to choose one
and follow it to its logical conclusion.
Say you are sitting in that orchard,
mending or praying—the overhead rush
will make you think of a dog, and in time
wonder whatever happened to that dog.
Okay for starters but the colors
are more bleak and heavy now
but that’s all right because more rounded,
human, like a statistic in mourning
for the body it used to represent
back in the good old days.
Now that you’ve come this far
it makes sense to take stock of you
in the mirror. Seams straight? “Seems”
they are. But you must get off the hood
of that car, or the bonnet, whatever the English call it,
for it to be happening, falling days and days
in dumb amaze. Happening like a city
of little explosions that protects
you wherever you go. And we need that protection—
It’s colors, just like the ones were at the beginning.
STRANGE THINGS HAPPEN AT NIGHT
Without thinking too much about it,
prepare to go out into the city of your dreams.
Now, look up. At first they cannot see you.
Later, the adjustment will be made.
Your boyfriend sips bark tea.
The number should’ve turned up by now.
Perhaps the driving rain impedes it,
the recession. In any case there are two too many of us here.
We must double up, or die.
And that might be a practical if remote solution.
It’s not every day you get to bicycle past the ribbons
of people, watch the grand hotels
for some event thought imminent—not lost.
If ever I was going to turn up your volume—
but this isn’t about living, is it?
Or is it? I mean, many suppers in the seven modes
or grades, as many as can be made to last
once the bosses and their beagles have passed through.
WORLD’S END
Sometimes it’s more time than we care to be,
with the others. Sometimes it’s interesting.
I can only tell you how to stop things happening.
Life is legendary. We’re very bullish
on life. Dogs and other lives
convince us life is dog-cheap.
The future is a ghost. The past,
it says here, is an automated manikin.
