Authors: John Ashbery
“How did you like the last one?”
“Was I good?” “I think it stinks.”
It’s a question of questions, first:
The nuts-and-bolts kind you know you can answer
And the impersonal ones you answer almost without meaning to:
“My greatest regret.” “What keeps the world from falling down.”
And then the results are brilliant:
Someone is summoned to a name, and soon
A roomful of people becomes dense and contoured
And words come out of the wall
To batter the rhythm of generation following on generation.
And I see once more how everything
Must be up to me: here a calamity to be smoothed away
Like ringlets, there the luck of uncoding
This singular cipher of primary
And secondary colors, and the animals
With us in the ark, happy to be there as it settles
Into an always more violent sea.
So much variation
In what is basically a one-horse town:
Part of me frivolous, part intentionally crude,
And part unintentionally thoughtless.
Modesty and false modesty stroll hand in hand
Like twin girls. But there are more abstract things too
That play a larger role. The intense, staccato repetitions
Of whatever. You don’t know and we don’t know either.
From there it’s a big, though necessary, leap to
The more subtly conceptual conditionings: your opinion
Of you shaped in the vacuum-form of suppositions,
Correct or false, of others, and how we can never be ourselves
While so much of us is going on in the minds of other people,
People you meet on the street who greet you strangely
As though remembering a recent trip to the Bahamas
And say things like: “It is broken. But we’d heard
You heard too. Isn’t it too bad about old things, old schools,
Old dishes, with nothing to do but sit and wait
Their turn. Meanwhile you’re
Looking stretched again, concentrated, as you do not pass
From point A to point B but merely speculate
On how it would be, and in that instant
Do appear to be traveling, though we all
Stay home, don’t we. Our strength lies
In the potential for motion, not in accomplishments, and it gets
Used up too, which is, in a way, more effective.”
But what about me, I
Wondered as the parachute released
Its carrousel into the sky over me?
I never think about it
Unless I think about it all the time
And therefore don’t know except in dreams
How I behave, what I mean to myself.
Should I wonder more
How I’m doing, inquire more after you
With the face like a birthday present
I am unwrapping as the parachute wanders
Through us, across blue ridges brown with autumn leaves?
People are funny—they see it
And then it’s that that they want.
No wonder we look out from ourselves
To the other person going on.
What about my end of the stick?
I keep thinking if I could get through you
I’d get back to me at a further stage
Of this journey, but the tent flaps fall,
The parachute won’t land, only drift sideways.
The carnival never ends; the apples,
The land, are duly tucked away
And we are left with only sensations of ourselves
And the dry otherness, like a clenched fist
Around the throttle as we go down, sideways and down.
They like to drink beer and wave their hands and whistle
Much as human beings everywhere do. Dark objects loom
Out of the night, attracted by the light of conversations,
And they take note of that, thinking how funny everything is.
It was a long time ago that you began. The dawn was brittle
And open, and things stayed in it for a long time as images
After the projecting urge had left. In the third year a tension
Arose like smoke on the horizon, but it was quickly subdued.
And now in the fifth year you return with tears
That are, I understand, a formality, to seal the naked time
And pave it over so that it may be walked across. The day with
Its straw flowers and dried fruits is for “putting up” too.
At a corner you meet the one who makes you glad, like a stranger
Off on some business. Come again soon. I will,
I will. Only this time let your serious proposals stick out
Into the bay a considerable distance, like piers. Remember
I am not the stranger I seem to be, only casual
And ruthless, but kind. Kind and strange. It isn’t a warning.
The flares in the lower sky are no longer ambitious
But a steady, droning red. That’s my middle initial up there,
Hanging over a populous city. Flowers and fires everywhere,
A warning surely. But they all lead their lives appropriately
Into desperation, and nobody seems surprised. Only the story
Stays behind, when they go away, sitting on a stone. It grew and grew.
Sometimes I get radiant drunk when I think of and/or look at you,
Upstaged by our life, with me in it.
And other mornings too
Your care is like a city, with the uncomfortable parts
Evasive, and difficult to connect with the plan
That was, and the green diagonals of the rain kind of
Fudging to rapidly involve everything that stood out,
And doing so in an illegal way, but it doesn’t matter,
It’s rapture that counts, and what little
There is of it is seldom aboveboard,
That’s its nature,
What we take our cue from.
It masquerades as worry, first, then as self-possession
In which I am numb, imagining I am this vision
Of ships stuck on the tarpaper of an urban main,
At night, coal stars glinting,
And you the ruby lights hung far above on pylons,
Seeming to own the night and the nearer reaches
Of a civilization we feel as ours,
The lining of our old doing.
I can walk away from you
Because I know I can always call, and in the end we will
Be irresolutely joined,
Laughing over this alphabet of connivance
That never goes on too long, because outside
My city there is wind, and burning straw and other things that don’t coincide,
To which we’ll be condemned, perhaps, some day.
Now our peace is in our assurance
And has that savor,
Its own blind deduction
Of whatever would become of us if
We were alone, to nurture on this shore some fable
To block out that other whose remote being
Becomes every day a little more sentient and more suavely realized.
I’ll believe it when the police pay
you
off.
In the meantime there are so many things not to believe in
We can make a hobby of them, as long as we continue to uphold
The principle of private property.
So what if ours is planted with tin-can trees
It’s better than a forest full of parked cars with the lights out,
Because the effort of staying back to side with someone
For whom number is everything
Will finally unplug the dark
And the black acacias stand out as symbols, lovers
Of what men will at last stop doing to each other
When we can be quiet, and start counting sheep to stay awake together.
Many colors will take you to themselves
But now I want someone to tell me how to get home.
The way back there is streaked and stippled,
A shaded place. It belongs where it is going
Not where it is. The flowers don’t talk to Ida now.
They speak only the language of flowers,
Saying things like, How hard I tried to get there.
It must mean I’m not here yet. But you,
You seem so formal, so serious. You can’t read poetry,
Not the way they taught us back in school.
Returning to the point was always the main thing, then.
Did we ever leave it? I don’t think so. It was our North Pole.
We skulked and hungered there for years, and now,
Like dazzled insects skimming the bright airs,
You are back on the road again, the path leading
Vigorously upward, through intelligent and clear spaces.
They don’t make rocks like us any more.
And holding on to the thread, fine as a cobweb, but incredibly strong,
Each of us advances into his own labyrinth.
The gift of invisibility
Has been granted to all but the gods, so we say such things,
Filling the road up with colors, faces,
Tender speeches, until they feed us to the truth.
The hospital: it wasn’t her idea
That the colors should slide muddy from the brush
And spew their random evocations everywhere,
Provided that things should pick up next season.
It was a way of living, to her way of thinking.
She took a job, it wasn’t odd.
But then, backing through the way many minds had been made up,
It came again, the color, always a color
Climbing the apple of the sky, often
A secret lavender place you weren’t supposed to look into.
And then a sneeze would come along
Or soon we’d be too far out from shore, on a milky afternoon
Somewhere in late August with the paint flaking off,
The lines of traffic flowing like mucus.
And they won’t understand its importance, it’s too bad,
Not even when it’s too late.
Now we’re often happy. The dark car
Moves heftily away along low bluffs,
And if we don’t have our feelings, what
Good are we, but whose business is it?
Beware the happy man: once she perched light
In the reading space of my room, a present joy
For all time to come, whatever happens;
And still we rotate, gathering speed until
Nothing is there but more speed in the light ahead.
Such moments as we prized in life:
The promise of a new day, living with lots of people
All headed in more or less the same direction, the sound of this
In the embracing stillness, but not the brutality,
And lists of examples of lots of things, and shit—
What more could we conceivably be satisfied with, it is
Joy, and undaunted
She leaves the earth at that point,
Intersecting all our daydreams of breakfast and lunch.
The Lady of Shalott’s in hot water again.
This and the dreams of any of the young
Were not her care. The river flowed
Hard by the hospital from whose gilded
Balconies and turrets fair spirits waved,
Lonely, like us. Here be no pursuers,
Only imagined animals and cries
In the wilderness, which made it “the wilderness,”
And suddenly the lonesomeness becomes a pleasant city
Fanning out around a lake; you get to meet
Precisely the person who would have been here now,
A dream no longer, and are polished and directed
By his deliberate grasp, back
To the reality that was always there despairing
Of your return as months and years went by,
Now silent again forever, the perfect space,
Attuned to your wristwatch
As though time would never go away again.
His dirty mind
Produced it all, an oratorio based on love letters
About our sexual habits in the early 1950s.
It wasn’t that these stories weren’t true,
Only that a different kind of work
Of the imagination had grown up around them, taller
Than redwoods, and not
Wanting to embarrass them, effaced itself
To the extent that a colossus could, and so you looked
And saw nothing, but suddenly felt better
Without wondering why. And the serial continues:
Pain, expiation, delight, more pain,
A frieze that lengthens continually, in the happy way
Friezes do, and no plot is produced,
Nothing you could hang an identifying question on.
It’s an imitation of pleasure; it may not work
But at least we’ll know then that we’ll have done
What we could, and chalk it up to virtue
Or just plain laziness. And if she glides
Backwards through us, a finger hooked
Out of death, we shall not know where the mystery began:
Inaccurate dreamers of our state,
Sodden from sitting in the rain too long.
Everyone has some work to be done
And after that they may have some fun.
Which sometimes leads to distraction.
Older faces than yours
Have been whirled away on heaven
Knows what wind like painted leaves in autumn.
Seriousness doesn’t help either:
Just when you get on it it slips its tether,
Laughing, runs happily away.
It is a question of forbearance among the days.
Ask, but not too often: that way most ways
Of leading up to the truth will approach you
Timidly at first, wanting to get to know you
Before wandering away on other paths
Leading out of your meanwhile safe precinct.
Your feet know what they’re doing.
And if later in the year some true fear,
A real demon comes to be installed
In the sang-froid of not doing anything,
The shoe is on the other foot
This time,
Just this one time.
Romance removes so much of this
Yet staying behind while it does so
Is no way to agitate
To break the year’s commotion where it loomed