into who knows whose trouble that the boarded-up sign
couldn’t spell. And then after years and years
I’m back—but it’s like two seconds on a conductor’s watch.
He patronized me, and all I could say was, “Wow,
this is goofy!” And he liked me in it, with the croquet tresses.
And the buccaneer said it was too soon,
that we’d find out in the grass trap, which is why
I echoed. Even children couldn’t pay attention
to all of it, and all of it is most certainly
where we are. No more candied lies. I’ll come out as the movie
trailer ends. I promise the sun was a switch, or tickler.
You Dropped Something
So what if it’s brackish my love
today’s junk mail is full of arms for you
the erotic weavings of slumlord
hermits and piss-elegant diatribes:
No more waving for you
at least for the time being
which is anybody’s stable
The lost nights thatched with regrets
shingled with antinomian heresy and hedged
about with ifs ands and buts
are nobody’s dream cycle to you
the arena of matches and pups
and further slide
into romantic chaos
Say they’re not keeping track anymore
that the wounded demoiselle is hopping
mad and more coal barges
have arrived on the harbor’s
slippery surface
Say then that they’re not well again
Jumping through hoops to train
myself to attract attention was always
sometimes my endeavor to attract
smart eyes
You that go out and go in
through memory’s many castles
are you single or just alone this evening
castrati belch forth some
air thought to be unfit
for today’s goads and geodes
She’ll be coming round the house
and faster too; some press goodies
overlooked in the mad rush to prepubescent freedom
whose minds got mismatched
Throw many more daggers at the stone
It’s ancient after all
how many comic strips do you invoke
what tarheels
in fashionable disarray
more strokes this morning
You come to the end of the row
at the wrong end and work back to the previous beginning
Do we really want to see it turn out all right
Are the guns trained on her
quarterdeck what about the ketch
And you do really go in
It’s a passably elegant solution
for what was only land office before
ancient miles of wind picking
the harrow clean
All standing around
just to welcome you
you and your pie-eyed souvenir chest and
the bride you brought from back east
nailed to the sun
You, My Academy
Maybe untwine my breath, like.
Remove the cast-off castanets from my chest hair.
That’s better. I can see more in the distance.
I won’t be giving this up any time soon,
yet commerce no longer functions the way it used to
in the days gone by. Small businesses
are beginning to go the way of the peacherino,
following the Pied Piper and his rats
into the cavity beneath the hill. Even big business
is foreign to itself, knows not what it dreams,
or wants. If it glances into the mirror
at times, it sees only a blank, supplemental wall.
Profit-taking is an unheard-of concept.
Only muddled enjoyment perceives that a crossover
took place in the recent past. Huddled shapes
of the homeless, hidden under dirty quilts,
are the one sign of that baleful trajectory
that left the street full of cannonballs like horse manure.
Enjoyment becomes a rare earth amid such strata,
something the landlady was going to tell you
but you were too quick for her on the landing.
It’s diffused now in the racing forms.
Fiona and Ilona, just back from Riga,
can’t understand what’s the fuss. “Weren’t there
seventeen-story G-men back when, too? Anyway, the kids
haven’t turned litmus pink—or have they?
What manner of golfer stands to reap anything
from this desperate situation?”
Ask a situationist, lady, I’m here for the free canapés
and the gin.
Bituminous ballocks thrash the sand spread outside.
It were time for the library, and to ferret out
who killed the sexton. “Not I,” says the dung beetle,
“Nor I,” the worm. But one of you surprised him in
the few seconds he went to get his pants. And my theory
is all but erected—an imposing pyramid
of squashes, eggplants, artichokes, leeks, celery, et al.
Is it too late to absorb that?
That’s why screeds were written—for dictionaries
to read them, and then come to conclusions
that would have been startling once, maybe thirty-five years ago,
but now no longer have power to shock, or even charm
as butterflies laughed to us in childhood,
and the creamy sails on the marsh filled with the light and the wind.
It must be light and bright as a brazier
down where you are now. Are you going to fax us any fun?
I was just sitting on the toilet, dreaming a ruse
to make you factions obey, and here you ring my doorbell
and hand me a large box wrapped like a harlequin—
Is it full of dishes? Are you going to be my “wee one”
once the attorneys have sailed back?
Or do we lose each other in the desolate glens
it seems the world is largely composed of?
Is that where your pointed toe is leading?
I’d jump off buildings for you, scale circus tents,
though I know it’s not exactly what you had in mind.
How about suburbia? “A sad pavane
for these distracted times.” How about the Everglades,
then? A mangrove is a wondrous thing
that never stops growing, unlike
our pencil-thin projects for reaping dividends
once the troglodytes have had their way with us,
and been assimilated by us. That won’t be for centuries,
but time’s caprice is a wild card, compressing lives
into a space of weeks or months, if need be,
sometimes.
And sometimes
when my horse looks at me, it’s a great treat,
or a great fright. Animals are about the last to listen
as you read from the Book of Hours—they get frisky
with listening, and the natural beauty of everything
wants it so—cut up for lenses to devour,
or vague and transparent as a subpoena when a tractor
stops to give us a lift to the nearest menstruating sun.
You Would Have Thought
Meanwhile, back in
soulless America, people are having fun
as usual.
A bird visits a birdbath.
A young girl takes a refresher course
in polyhistory. My mega-units are straining
at the leash of spring.
The annual race is on—
&
nbsp; white flowers in someone’s hair.
He comes in waltzing on empty airs,
mulling the blue notes of your case.
The leash is elastic and receptive
but I fear I am too wrapped up in cloudlets
of my own making this time.
In the other time it was rain dripping
from a tree to a house to the ground—
each thing helping itself and another thing
along a little. That would be inconceivable
these days of receptive answers and aggressive querying.
The routine is all too familiar,
the stone path wearying.
Young People
Slowly he is eating the stars—
they are like the spines of books to him,
but don’t throw two ladies or locations at him.
He called this Nomad’s Land.
Yet it was clean and serious. Not, it is true,
cheerful. Not by any means. Yet the old men
in pajamas made a leisurely appearance.
Good times were on the phonograph.
Surely somebody can be his wife,
surely there are strong husbands for such women,
who keep a rifle in the broom closet
and never ask for i.d. Their colors:
those of a saffron strand at evening
in disappointed August. We rise with the swifts,
never to know what cut us loose.
About the Author
John Ashbery was born in 1927 in Rochester, New York, and grew up on a farm near Lake Ontario. He studied English at Harvard and at Columbia, and along with his friends Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch, he became a leading voice in what came to be called the New York School of poets. Ashbery’s poetry collection Some Trees was selected by W. H. Auden as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize in 1955—the first of over twenty-five critically admired works Ashbery has published in a career spanning more than six decades. His book Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award, and since then Ashbery has been the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a National Humanities Medal, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and a Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other honors.
For years, Ashbery taught creative writing at Brooklyn College and Bard College in New York, working with students and codirecting MFA programs while continuing to write and publish award-winning collections of poetry—all marked by his signature philosophical wit, ardent honesty, and polyphonic explorations of modern language. His most recent book of poems is Quick Question, published in 2012. He lives in New York.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
The author gratefully acknowledges the following publications in which poems in Can You Hear, Bird first appeared: American Poetry Review, Antaeus, Arshile, Chelsea, The Colorado Review, Cover, Epoch, Grand Street, The Harvard Review, Kaldeway Press, The New Yorker, 1995 Biennial Exhibition Catalog (Whitney Museum), PN Review, The Paris Review, Poetry (Chicago), Privates, The Times Literary Supplement, Writing for Bernadette (Great Barrington, Mass.; The Figures, 1995), The Yale Review, Denver Quarterly, London Quarterly, The London Review of Books, and The New Republic
Copyright © 1995 by John Ashbery
Cover design by Mimi Bark
978-1-4804-5934-2
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