Read Your Name Here: Poems Online
Authors: John Ashbery
“Welcome to my home ... well, to our home,” the woman said gaily. “As you can see, the grapes are being harvested.” It seemed she could read my mind. “They say this year’s vintage will be a mediocre one, but the sight is lovely, nonetheless. Don’t you agree, Mr. ...”
“Hans,” I replied curtly. The prospect was indeed a lovely one, but I wanted to leave. Making some excuse I guided Anna by the elbow toward the stairs and we left.
“That wasn’t polite of you,” she said dryly.
“Honey, I’ve had enough of people who can read your mind. When I want it done I’ll go to a mind reader.”
“I happen to be one and I can tell you what you’re thinking is false. Listen to what the big bell says: ‘We are all strangers on our own turf, in our own time.’ You should have paid attention. Now adjustments will have to be made.”
It crossed the road so as to avoid having to greet me. “Poor thing but mine own,” I said, “without a song the day would never end.” Warily the thing approached. I pitied its stupidity so much that huge tears began to well up in my eyes, falling to the hard ground with a plop. “I don’t need a welcome like that,” it said. “I was ready for you. All the ladybugs and the buzzing flies and the alligators know about you and your tricks. Poor, cheap thing. Go away, and take your song with you.”
Night had fallen without my realizing it. Several hours must have passed while I stood there, mulling the grass and possible replies to the hapless creature. A mason still stood at the top of a ladder repairing the tiles in a roof, by the light of the moon. But there was no moon. Yet I could see his armpits, hair gushing from them, and the tricks of the trade with which he was so bent on fixing that wall.
“Her name is Liz, and I need her in my biz,” I hummed wantonly. A band of clouds all slanted in the same direction drifted across the hairline horizon like a tribe of adults and children, all hastening toward some unknown destination. A crisp pounding. Done to your mother what? Are now the ... And so you understand it, she ... I. Once you get past the moralizing a new winter twilight creeps into place. And a lot of guys just kind of live through it? Ossified soup, mortised sloop. Woody has the staff to do nothing. You never know what. That’s what I think. Like two notes of music we slid apart, far from one another’s protective jealousy. The old cat, sunning herself, had no problem with that. Nor did the diaphanous trains of fairies that sagged down from a sky that suggested they had never been anywhere, least of all there. At the time we had a good laugh over it. But it did hurt. It still does. That’s what I think, he slapped.
Thought I’d write you this poem. Yes,
I know you don’t need it. No,
you don’t have to thank me for it. Just
want to kind of get it off my chest
and drop it in the peanut dust.
You came at me and that was something.
I was more than a match for you, you
were a match for me, we undid the clasps
in our shirtings, it was a semblance of all right.
Then the untimely muse got wind of it.
Picked it up, hauled it over there.
The bandy-legged man was watching
all this time. “... to have Betty back on board.”
Now it’s time for love-twenty.
Assume your places on the shuffleboard.
You, Sam, must make a purple prayer
out of origami and stuff it. If you’ve
puked it’s already too late.
I see all behind me small canyons, drifting,
filling up with the space of drifting.
The chair in the attic is up to no good.
Then you took me and held me like I was a child
or a prize. For a moment there I thought I knew you,
but you backed away, wiping your specs, “Oh,
excuse ...” It’s okay,
will come another time
when stupendous seabirds are carilloning out over the Atlantic,
when the charging fire engine adjusts its orange petticoats
after knocking down the old man the girl picks up.
Now it’s too late, the books are closed, the salmon
no longer spewing. Just so you know.
Didn’t you get my card?
We none of us, you see, knew we were coming
until the bus was actually pulling out of the terminal.
I gazed a little sadly at the rubber of my shoes’
soles, finding it wanting.
I got kind of frenzied after the waiting
had stopped, but now am cool as a suburban garden
in some lost city. When it came time for my speech
I could think of nothing, of course.
I gave a little talk about the onion—how its flavor
inspires us, its shape informs our architecture.
There were so many other things I wanted to say, too,
but, dandified, I couldn’t strut,
couldn’t sit down for all the spit and polish.
Now it’s your turn to say something about the wall
in the garden. It can be anything.
Sometimes the drums would actually let us play
between beats, and that was nice. Before closing time.
By then the clown’s anus
would get all chewed up by the donkey
that hated having a tail pinned on it,
which was perhaps understandable. The three-legged midgets
ran around, they enjoyed hearing us play so much,
and the saxophone had something to say
about all this, but only to itself.
Clusters of pollen blot out the magnolia blossoms this year
and that’s about all there is to it. Like I said,
it’s pretty much like last year, except for Brooke.
She was determined to get a job in the city. When last heard from
she had found one, playing a sonata of Beethoven’s (one
of the easier ones) in the window of a department store
downtown somewhere, and then that closed, the whole city did,
tighter’n a drum. So we have only our trapezoidal reflections
to look at in its blue glass sides, and perhaps admire—
oh, why can’t this be some other day? The children all came over
(we thought they were midgets at first) and wanted
to be told stories to, but mostly to be held.
John I think did the right thing by shoveling them under the carpet.
And then there were the loose wickets
after the storm, and that made croquet impossible.
Hailstones the size of medicine balls were rolling down the slope anyway
right toward our doorstep. Most of them melted before they got there, but one,
a particularly noxious one, actually got in the house and left its smell,
a smell of violets, in fact, all over the hall carpet,
which didn’t cancel one’s rage at breaking and entering,
of all crimes the most serious, don’t you fear?
I’ve got to finish this. Father will be after me.
Oh, and did the red rubber balls ever arrive? We could do something
with them, I just have to figure out what.
Today a stoat came to tea
and that was so nice it almost made me cry—
look, the tears in the mirror are still streaming down my face
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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 on the paper
on the table by the bed? Is there something there
or was that from another last night?