And the Stars Were Shining

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.