by John Ashbery
as if there were no tomorrow. But there is one, I fear,
a nice big one. Well, so long,
and don’t touch any breasts, at least until I get there.
BRAND LOYALTY
“Father, you’re destroying the collectibles!”
“You are mistaken. I’m enjoying them! The green magenta finish on this one reminds me of the piano shawl in our flat in Harbin—only greener, as though slits of light were coming through its slits.”
“At least we have the lilacs.”
How he would get a little too creative, God and I both know. He’s spent the morning chiding the waterspout, clearly amazed as it drew increasingly closer. “I’ve had it with natural phenomena. They never know when to draw the line. At least we have some sense, and we’re natural phenomena too, for goodness sakes.”
I wouldn’t let it get to me. On the other hand, the waterspout or whatever you call it is getting to us. It touched down, back there, and only a moment ago it was in front of us. I suggest we sidle along the sand.
The deuce you say! On the other hand, if you really think so.
We could offer it tea and cookies, but in a moment it’ll be too late for anything but palsied brooding on the tired theme of retribution. Like I said, they build them stronger and stronger until it’s encoded in them. They can’t help putting their best foot forward, and where does that leave us! After all, a little peace was all we were after.
If only you’d read up on the subject like you said you were going to.
Yes, well we can’t alarm our surroundings too much, even as they torture us. That way we’d only slip out of pain and not see the exciting denouement. And what a sweet-tempered morning it was. Put aside our notions of the intrepid, the universe is paying a courtesy call, God has us on hold, and there’s not much we can do except spin like dervishes, human tops. Hair climbing upward to a point, a kind of spire, and all I’d done was brush down the sides.
Can we do it that way now?
Not exactly. The village is walking toward us, we are becoming its walls and graffiti-sprayed cement bathrooms, its general store, the tipsy taxi driver. If I told you where we were going it wouldn’t be a surprise anymore, and yet it would ...
Sounds like my friend Casper, the girl said.
RAIN IN THE SOUP
Raindrops fall on the treetops. A rainy day.
Yes, it’s that kind of a day. Some human suffering.
A number of malcontents. If Mr. Soup
will stay in his bowl, I’ll blow on him.
Elsewhere stockings are being darned.
The darning egg is as big as a house.
All this less-than-great happiness
may be doing good to life somewhere else,
off in the bayou. Maybe. But we see it
from the top, like a triangular dome,
so it looks okay to us.
Unicyclists are out in force,
leading to the Next Interesting Thing
that’s sure to be gone by the time you and I get there.
I don’t count ivy climbing a chimney,
that’s reached the top and is waving around, senselessly.
I’d like to push a raft down the beach,
wade into the water waist-deep, and get on it.
But clearly, nothing in this world was made for me.
It’s sixes and sevens, the chimes go out
into the city and accomplish something valid.
I can stand to stand here, standing it, that’s all.
Good day Mrs. Smith. Your daughter is as cute as anything.
BLOODFITS
As inevitable as a barking dog, second-hand music
drifts down five flights of stairs and out into the street,
adjusting seams, checking makeup in pocket mirror.
Inside the camera obscura, jovial as ever,
dentists make all the money. I didn’t know that then.
Children came out to tell me, in measured tones,
how cheap the seaside is, how the salt air reddens cheeks.
Violently dented by storms, the new silhouettes
last only a few washings.
Put your glasses on and read the label. Hold that bat.
He’d sooner break rank than wind.
He’s bought himself a shirt the color of Sam Rayburn Lake,
muddled ocher by stumps and land practices. Picnicking prisoners
never fail to enjoy the musk that drifts off it
in ever-thickening waves,
triggering bloody nostalgia
for a hypotenuse that never was.
IMPLICIT FOG
We began adulating
what we were staring at
too:
I was following the paths in the music.
Might as well have been patting myself dry
under a toadstool.
Winter came on neck and neck
with spring, somehow.
The two got tangled up for reasons
best known to themselves.
By the time it was over
summer had ended
with a quiet, driven day
out under the trees
in folding chairs:
troops ejected from a local bar.
It got lovely and then a little hirsute.
DREAM SEQUENCE (UNTITLED)
Yes, she chopped down a big tree.
We could all breathe easier again.
It wasn’t the hole in the landscape
that gladdened us, it was the invitation to the weather
to drop in anytime.
Which it did, in proportion to our not growing interested in it.
After a third mishap we decided
to throw in meaning. No dice.
Our tapestry still kept on reviving itself
athwart the scary shore. You could look into it
and see fog that had been dead for years,
cheerful hellos uttered centuries ago.
Worse, we were going somewhere;
this was no longer the bush leagues, but a cantata
nature had ordered from the celestial caterer,
and now it was being delivered.
There were only a few false notes; these mattered less
than a cat in a cathedral. Suddenly we were all singing
our diaries of vengeance, or fawning thank-you notes, or whatever.
The hotel billed us by the hour
but for some reason the telegraph wires weren’t included
in the final reckoning. Too, the water-tower had disappeared
as though deleted by a child’s blue eraser.
It was then that the nets of chiming
explained what we had needed to know years ago:
that a step in the wrong direction is the keyhole
to today’s busy horizon, like hay, that seems to know where it’s moving when it’s moving.
WHAT IS WRITTEN
What is written on the paper
on the table by the bed? Is there something there
or was that from another last night?
Why is that bird ignoring us,
pausing in mid-flight, to take another direction?
Is it feelings of guilt about the spool
it dropped on the bank of a stream,
into which it eventually rolled? Dark spool,
moving oceanward now—what other fate could have been yours?
You could have lived in a drawer
for many years, imprisoned, a ward of the state. Now you are free
to call the shots pretty much as they come.
Poor, bald thing.
CARAVAGGIO AND HIS FOLLOWERS
You are my most favorite artist. Though I know
very little about your work. Some of your followers I know:
Mattia Preti, who toiled so hard to so little
effect (though it was enough). Luca Giordano, involved
with some of the darkest reds ever pa
inted, and lucent greens,
thought he had discovered the secret of the foxgloves.
But it was too late. They had already disappeared
because they had been planted in some other place.
Someone sent some bread up
along with a flask of wine, to cheer him up,
but the old, old secret of the foxgloves, never
to be divined, won’t ever go away.
I say, if you were toting hay up the side of a stack
of it, that might be Italian. Or then again, not.
We have these things in Iowa,
too, and in the untrained reaches of the eyelid
hung out, at evening, over next to nothing. What was it she had said,
back there, at the beginning? “The flowers
of the lady next door are beginning to take flight,
and what will poor Robin do then?” It’s true, they were blasting off
every two seconds like missiles from a launching pad, and nobody wept, or even cared.
Look out of the window, sometime, though, and you’ll see
where the difference has been made. The song of the shrubbery
can’t drown out the mystery of what we are made of,
of how we go along, first interested by one thing and then another
until we come to a wide avenue whose median
is crowded with trees whose madly peeling bark is the color of a roan,
perhaps, or an Irish setter. One can wait on the curb for the rest
of one’s life, for all anyone cares, or one can cross
when the light changes to green, as in the sapphire folds
of a shot-silk bodice Luca Giordano might have bothered with.
Now it’s life. But, as Henny Penny said to Turkey Lurkey, something
is hovering over us, wanting to destroy us, but waiting,
though for what, nobody knows.
In the night of the museum, though, some whisper like stars
when the guards have gone home, talking freely to one another.
“Why did that man stare, and stare? All afternoon it seemed he stared
at me, though he obviously saw nothing. Only a fragment of a vision
of a lost love, next to a pool. I couldn’t deal with it
much longer, but luckily I didn’t have to. The experience
is ending. The time for standing to one side is near
now, very near.”
INDUSTRIAL COLLAGE
We are constantly running checks.
Quantity control is our concern here, you see.
No batch is allowed to leave the premises
without at least a superficial glance along the tops
of the crates. For who knows how much magic
may be imprisoned there?
Likewise, when the product reaches the market
we like to kind of keep an eye on things there too.
Complaints about the magic
have dwindled to a mere trickle in recent years.
Still you never know if some guy’s going to get funny
and tamper with the equation, causing
apocalyptic sighs to break out in the streets,
barking dogs, skidding vehicles, and the whole consignment
of ruthless consequences. That is why we keep a team of experts
on hand, always awake, alert for the slightest thread of disorder
on someone’s pants. In spring these incidents can double, quadruple, even.
Everything wants to be let out of its box come April or May
and we have to test-drive the final result before it’s been gummed
into the album dark farces regulate. Someone, then, must be constantly
on duty, as well as a relief contingent, for this starry mass
to continue revolving.
Like an apple on the ground
it looks at you. The neighborhood police were kind,
arrested a miscreant, though he was never brought to trial,
which is normal for this type of event.
Meanwhile spring edges inexorably into summer,
where, paradoxically, there is more activity but less to show for it.
The merry-go-rounds begin turning in the carnivals of August.
Best to leave prison till winter, once the honor system has broken down.
A stalemate could pollute new beginnings.
November tells it best, in a whisper almost,
so that there is surprisingly little letdown,
only this new background, a finer needle to thread.
FROGS AND GOSPELS
How does one interpret, on this late branch, the unexpected?
—James Tate, “The Horseshoe”
A chance balloon drew these settlers nigh.
It was the year of green honey that sprouts
between the toes of the seated god. “None
can explain it further.” No explanations,
not from me.
I sat in the bakery, rumpled, unshaved,
pondering a theorem. What you said the hotel was.
Someone else’s towel approached me in the laundry.
“Ouch was what I said.” This has been more than I know of,
brimming with indifference, some American in Europe.
He let me off at the corner of some strange country.
The signs were in English. No one cared if
you knew the rubbish was filth.
He carried me from the room in which people were sitting.
They always think they know better, even as they confess
their ignorance blindly, to the first stranger they know.
I see, it’s a market garden, or was
some seasons ago. In this dark stubble I abide.
A messenger came with tidings. I’m sorry,
I’ve had enough tidings.
Giddy with surprise, he crawled upward
toward where I was toasting myself.
A male muse I suppose. I’ve listened to that
before, too. All I want is to be let out
to travel on the gravel. You still don’t
get it, this is a seat. All right, I want my seat,
I said.
That’s no easy manner. The blond moon came untied,
drifted through blue-black wisps
of a woodpile somewhere. Must I follow her too?
Must I follow her too?
Whatever it says you must do.
You had calm days in store, now they have come undone.
Worries stretch before you into the distance.
Perhaps distance is what you had,
once, and must now drink. Only forty years ago
early skyscrapers arched their backs, waiting to be fed.
And still the feeling comes on.
WEEKEND
Swan filets and straw wine,
an emphatic look to the driveway
whose golf clubs are scattered feelingly.
You can undress and sit down
on the corduroy doormat blowing
and when the Weird Sisters come calling
pretend to be talking to yourself.
Trouble is they don’t come calling,
suffering as they do from terminal agoraphobia.
A frog juts from a pinecone.
My goodness was that you back there?
You sure know
how to give a feller a good scare.
I’d thought it was just bats
dripping tar on the heads of the guests and the footmen.
You see so little live action in this town
and then everybody wants to cooperate
or celebrate, sort of. I can do that too.
Always. Have a good time.
Something might come out in group therapy:
your velvet soul as I just realized it.
Please come back. I liked you so much.
Thistles, dandelions, what do we care?
GET ME REWRITE
The
ghoulish
resonance
of
a
cello
resonates in a neighbor’s cabana.
What do I know of this?
I
am
sitting
on a pile of dirt in a neighbor’s back yard.
Was there something else to do?
Long ago we crept for candy
through the neighbor’s gutter
but found only candy wrappers
of an unknown species: “Sycamores,”
“Chocolate Spit,” “Slate-Gray Fluids,”
“Anamorphic Portraits of Old Goriot.”
The way a piece of candy seems to flutter
in the prismatic light above a clothesline, stops,
removes all its clothes.
There was a bucket
of water
to wash in,
fingerposts pointing the way to the next phenomenon:
sugar falling gently on strawberries, snow on a pile of red eggs.
None of us was really satisfied,
but none of us wanted to go away, either.
The shadows of an industrial park loomed below us,
the brass sky above.
“Get off your duff,” Reuel commanded.
(He was our commander.)
“You are like the poet Lenz, who ran from house to forest
to rosy firmament and back
and nobody ever saw his legs move.”
Ah,
it is good
to be back
in the muck.
INVASIVE PROCEDURES
I flee from those who are gifted with understanding, fearing that all their great and illuminating invasions of my being still won’t satisfy me.
—Robert Walser, “The One of Fairy Tales”
Massachusetts rests its feet
