Authors: John Ashbery
Water, a bossa nova, a cello is centred, the light behind the library
I was swimming with the water at my back, funny thing is it was real this time. I mean this time it was working. We weren’t too far from shore, the guides hadn’t noticed yet. Always you work out of the possibility of being injured, but this time, all the new construction, the new humiliation, you have to see it. Guess it’s OK to take a look. But a cup of tea—you wouldn’t want to spill it. And a grapefruit (spelled “grapfruit” on the small, painstakingly lettered card) after a while, and the new gray suit. Then more, and more, it was a kind of foliage or some built-in device to trip you. Make you fall. The encounter with the silence of permissiveness stretching away like a moonlit sea to the horizon, whatever that really is.
They
want you to like it. And you honor them in liking it. You cause pleasure before sleep insists, draws over to where you may yet be. And some believe this is merely a detail. And they may be right. And we may be the whole of which all that truly happens is only peelings and shreds of bark. Not that we are too much more than these. Remember they don’t have to thank you for it either.
The subtracted sun, all I’m going by here, with the boy, this new maneuver is less than the letter in the wind
Dark at four again. Sadly I negotiate the almost identical streets as little by little they are obliterated under a rain of drips and squiggles of light. Their message of universal brotherhood through suffering is taken from the top, the pedal held down so that the first note echoes throughout the piece without becoming exactly audible. It collects over different parts of the city and the drift in those designated parts is different from elsewhere. It is a man, it was one all along. No it isn’t. It is a man with the conscience of a woman, always coming out of something, turning to look at you, wondering about a possible reward. How sweet to my sorrow is this man’s knowledge in his way of coming, the brotherhood that will surely result under now darkened skies.
The pressing, pressing urgent whispers, pushing on, seeing directly
Bring them all back to life, with white gloves on, out of the dream in which they are still alive. Loosen the adhesive bonds that tie them to the stereotypes of the dead, clichés like the sound of running water. Abruptly it was winter again. A slope several football fields wide sprang out of the invisible foreground, the one behind me, and unlaced its barren provocation upwards, with flair and menace, at a 20-degree angle—the ascending night and also the voice in it that means to be heard, a pagoda of which is visible at the left horizon, not meaning much: the flurry of a cold wind. We’re in it too chortled the rowanberries. And how fast so much aggressiveness unfolded, like a swiftly flowing, silent stream. Along its banks world history presented itself as a series of translucent tableaux, fading imperceptibly into one another, so that the taking of Quebec by the British in 1629 melts into the lollipop tints of Marquette and Joliet crossing the mouth of the Missouri River. But at the center a rope of distress twists itself ever tighter around some of the possessions we brought from the old place and were going to arrange here. And what about the courteous but dispassionate gaze of an armed messenger on his way from someplace to someplace else that is the speech of all the old, resurrected loves, tinged with respect, caring to see that you are no longer alone now in this dream you chose. The dark yellowish flow of light drains out of the slanted dish of the sky and from the masses of the loved a tremendous chant arises: We are viable! And so back into the city with its glimmers of possibility like Broadway nights of notoriety and the warm syrup of embarrassed and insistent proclamations of all kinds of tidings that made you what you were in the world and made the world for you, only diminished once it had been seen and become the object of further speculation leading like railroad ties out of the present inconclusive sphere into the world of two dimensions.
A terminus, pole fringed with seaweed at its base, a cracked memory
To be involved in every phase of directing, acting, producing and so on must be infinitely rewarding. Just as when a large, fat, lazy frog hops off his lily pad like a spitball propelled by a rubber band and disappears into the water of the pond with an enthusiastic plop. It cannot be either changed or improved on. So too with many of life’s little less-than-pleasurable experiences, like the rain that falls and falls for so long that no one can remember when it began or what weather used to be, or cares much either; they are much too busy trying to plug holes in ceilings or emptying pails and other containers and then quickly pushing them back to catch the overflow. But nobody seems eager to accord ideal status to this situation and I, for one, would love to know why. Don’t we realize that after all these centuries that are now starting to come apart like moldy encyclopedias in some abandoned, dusty archive that we have to take the bitter with the sweet or soon all distinctions will be submerged by the tide of tepid approval of everything that is beginning to gather force and direction as well? And when its mighty roar threatens in earnest the partially submerged bridges and cottages, picks up the floundering cattle to deposit them in trees and so on to who knows what truly horrible mischief, it will be time, then, to genuinely rethink this and come up with true standards of evaluation, only it will be too late of course, too late for anything but the satisfaction that lasts only just so long. A pity, though. Meanwhile I lift my glass to these black-and-silver striped nights. I believe that the rain never drowned sweeter, more prosaic things than those we have here, now, and I believe this is going to have to be enough.
Striped hair, inquisitive gloves, a face, some woman named Ernestine Throckmorton, white opera glasses and more
“…when the snow lay round about,
deep and crisp and even…”
A year away from the pigpen, and look at him.
A thirsty unit by an upending stream,
Man doctors, God supplies the necessary medication
If elixir were to be found in the world’s dolor, where is none.
A thirsty unit by an upending stream,
Ashamed of the moon, of everything that hides too little of her nakedness—
If elixir were to be found in the world’s dolor, where is none,
Our emancipation should be great and steady.
Ashamed of the moon, of everything that hides too little of her nakedness—
The twilight prayers begin to emerge on a country crossroads.
Our emancipation should be great and steady
As crossword puzzles done in this room, this after-effect.
The twilight prayers begin to emerge on a country crossroads
Where no sea contends with the interest of the cherry trees.
As crossword puzzles done in this room, this after-effect,
I see the whole thing written down.
Where no sea contends with the interest of the cherry trees
Everything but love was abolished. It stayed on, a stepchild.
I see the whole thing written down:
Business, a lack of drama. Whatever the partygoing public needs.
Everything but love was abolished. It stayed on, a stepchild.
The bent towers of the playroom advanced to something like openness,
Business, a lack of drama. Whatever the partygoing public needs
To be kind, and to forget, passing through the next doors.
The bent towers of the playroom advanced to something like openness.
But if you heard it, and you didn’t want it
To be kind, and to forget, passing through the next doors
(For we believe him not exiled from the skies)…
But if you heard it, and if you didn’t want it,
Why do I call to you after all this time?
For we believe him not exiled from the skies.
Because I wish to give only what the specialist can give,
Why do I call to you after all this time?
Your own friends, running for mayor, behaving outlandishly
Because I wish to give only what the specialist can give,
Spend what they care to.
Your own friends, running for mayor, behaving outlandishly,
(And I have known him cheaply)
Spend what they care to.
A form of ignorance, you might say. Let’s leave that though.
And I have known him cheaply.
Agree to remove all that concern, another exodus—
A form of ignorance, you might say. Let’s leave that though.
The mere whiteness was a blessing, taking us far.
Agree to remove all that concern, another exodus.
A year away from the pigpen, and look at him.
The mere whiteness was a blessing, taking us far.
Man doctors, God supplies the necessary medication.
Sir, I am one of a new breed
Of inquisitive pest in love with the idea
Of our integrity, programming us over dark seas
Into small offices, where we sit and compete
With you, on your own time.
We want only to be recognized for what we are;
Everything else is secondary.
Consequently, I shall sit on your doorstep
Till you notice me. I’m still too young
To be overlooked, yet not old enough to qualify
For full attention. I’ll flesh out
The thin warp of your dreams, make them meatier,
Nuttier. And when a thin pall gathers
Leading finally to outraged investigation
Into what matters next, I’ll be there
On the other side.
Half of me I give
To do with as you wish—scold, ignore, forget for awhile.
The other half I keep, and shall feel
Fully rewarded if you pass by this offer
Without recognizing it, receding deliberately
Into the near distance, which speaks no longer
Of loss, but of brevity rather: short naps, keeping fit.
The first movie I ever saw was the Walt Disney cartoon
The Three Little Pigs.
My grandmother took me to it. It was back in the days when you went “downtown.” There was a second feature, with live actors, called
Bring ’Em Back Alive
, a documentary about the explorer Frank Buck. In this film you saw a python swallow a live pig. This wasn’t scary. In fact, it seemed quite normal, the sort of thing you
would
see in a movie—“reality.”
A little later we went downtown again to see a movie of
Alice in Wonderland
, also with live actors. This wasn’t very surprising either. I think I knew something about the story; maybe it had been read to me. That wasn’t why it wasn’t surprising, though. The reason was that these famous movie actors, like W. C. Fields and Gary Cooper, were playing different roles, and even though I didn’t know who they were, they were obviously important for doing other kinds of acting, and so it didn’t seem strange that they should be acting in a special way like this, pretending to be characters that people already knew about from a book. In other words, I imagined specialties for them just from having seen this one example. And I was right, too, though not about the film, which I liked. Years later I saw it when I was grown up and thought it was awful. How could I have been wrong the first time? I knew it wasn’t inexperience, because somehow I was experienced the first time I saw a movie. It was as though my taste had changed, though I had not, and I still can’t help feeling that I was right the first time, when I was still relatively unencumbered by my experience.
I forget what were the next movies I saw and will skip ahead to one I saw when I was grown up,
The Lonedale Operator
, a silent short by D. W. Griffith, made in 1911 and starring Blanche Sweet. Although I was in my twenties when I saw it at the Museum of Modern Art, it seems as remote from me in time as my first viewing of
Alice in Wonderland.
I can remember almost none of it, and the little I can remember may have been in another Griffith short,
The Lonely Villa,
which may have been on the same program. It seems that Blanche Sweet was a heroic telephone operator who managed to get through to the police and foil some gangsters who were trying to rob a railroad depot, though I also see this living room—small, though it was supposed to be in a large house—with Mary Pickford running around, and this may have been a scene in
The Lonely Villa.
At that moment the memories stop, and terror, or tedium, sets in. It’s hard to tell which is which in this memory, because the boredom of living in a lonely place or having a lonely job, and even of being so far in the past and having to wear those funny uncomfortable clothes and hairstyles is terrifying, more so than the intentional scariness of the plot, the criminals, whoever they were.
Imagine that innocence (Lilian Harvey) encounters romance (Willy Fritsch) in the home of experience (Albert Basserman). From there it is only a step to terror, under the dripping boughs outside. Anything can change as fast as it wants to, and in doing so may pass through a more or less terrible phase, but the true terror is in the swiftness of changing, forward or backward, slipping always just beyond our control. The actors are like people on drugs, though they aren’t doing anything unusual—as a matter of fact, they are performing brilliantly.
I am beginning to wonder
Whether this alternative to
Sitting back and doing something quiet
Is the clever initiative it seemed. It’s
Also relaxation and sunlight branching into
Passionate melancholy, jealousy of something unknown;
And our minds, parked in the sky over New York,
Are nonetheless responsible. Nights
When the paper comes
And you walk around the block
Wrenching yourself from the lover every five minutes
And it hurts, yet nothing is ever really clean
Or two-faced. You are losing your grip
And there are still flowers and compliments in the air: