You go on your nerve.
Take no prisoners.
Fine. I don’t want any prisoners
anyway I thought.
Stretched by history,
teething a new day,
what is convoluted gets to be convoluted,
and our brief passion left its scar,
firmly, on murk
which was OK until that other day.
Father of the bending serpents—
as they look back on the 21st century
what will we see?
Now he’s retiring and she’s retiring and their kids are retiring—
I say sir I don’t feel
though I have never felt better.
Better to be the cusp of someone’s tongue
and the materials of a new room begin arriving.
THE BUSINESS OF FALLING ASLEEP (2)
Par délicatesse j’ai perdu ma vie.
—Rimbaud
Days, things, times of day. Big things like unseen bells. Unheard moments. Suburbs are pale orange and a greenish blue I associate with fire escapes and school. The school looms now: a person with five questions at its back. They can’t stay there, for now. They’ll be back.
The interrogation was like a question mark. Once you stop to listen you’re hooked. No, go back to the stone please. What did it say over the stone? Don’t say I can’t remember, you remember everything. That is true but I’ll remember the stone
like the face of only the third dead person I’d ever seen. Well it’s happened, he seemed to be saying. The eyes were closed (I suppose they always are). What are you going to do now? We don’t have to stay like this. We could meet perhaps outside. Have a tea like we used to.
They moved the hotel boat to a less ostentatious location, still it felt hard coming to you through trees and other animated life. “Its music doesn’t gel.” Yes, but a weird creepy feeling came over me that you might know about all this, not wanted to tell me but just know. It’s amazing how the past shrinks to the size of your palm, forced to hold all that now. Falling down the steps in Marlborough Street. That was just one thing, but others I don’t know, never will know, are cupped in the hand as well. To brave the day turning outward like an ear, too polite to hear.
Rimbaud said it well, though his speech could be clamorous. One accepts that too within a broader parterre of accepting, a load of sun coming over the house to dampen discreet despair, woven into the togs of somebody standing up to go having remarked on the time as though there were a time to go. One would rather be left with few words and the resulting remainder of unease than never to have left the party.
Visions of a terrace with a cell phone ought to be engraved on the waiting skull, like Brahms. Anxious in the predicate but adept socially, pressure to have the music come out in a certain place, where it can be abandoned if desired. How about it? I care too much
not to leave it all. Set this down too ...
REAL TIME
A merry-go-round reminds itself of flies,
listing dangerously in its element.
Thousands of years engrossed its sullen size.
In boiled wool and woolen lace, clockwise
our elders cinched a quad with ice o’ersprent
as merry-go-rounds bethought themselves of flies.
Glimpsed sharp in ragged dawn the old franchise
builds for us what they could have hardly meant.
Thousands of years engross its sullen size
that demon domestics haste to neutralize.
As in old flickers, laughs and colors blent
in a merry-go-round, doom themselves like flies—
though it’s not urgent; there’s time to entomologize.
We need only yawn, following the docent’s
trail, and thousands of years engross our sullen size.
Age sags; little’s left to elegize.
Waking from waltz-dream with time to repent
our merry-go-round bestirs itself, then flies.
Thousands of tears erode its sullen sides.
HEAVENLY DAYS
I
The philosopher walked over to me and tapped me on the brow
with his pencil. Now does this remind you of anything?
Have you ever seen anything like this before?
Yes, if it’s in sync with the marrow of the growing world.
I can relate to that mattress. I do. I mean I do, sometimes.
And what day of the week might this be?
I’ll make a wild guess—it’s Thursday. You’re wrong,
though it seems like a Thursday. They sent me the Times
upstream all the way, it arrived and began to smile, I
was startled, I always am when it’s like that. But this
time it was different, more was at stake, though I don’t know
what, exactly. More overtime, perhaps. Get
on with it, we don’t have all night. You think
I like watching the candles gutter? Well, do you?
Yes, I think you do rather, but that’s not the point.
Well what is the fucking point? It’s that you were here,
earlier, and took too long to get here. By then
it was too late, but you’d been here earlier, hoping to cast
it as earlier, and yourself in a favorable light.
That light is now swaying from the chandelier, like an orangutan
awaiting further instructions, in mid-mischief, wondering if
all this is porridge after all. The philosopher is your boyfriend.
Remember you were hot before. Now it seems like an unseasonable crust,
with breath still to be counted, the weird smell,
and the way it all tallies with the trellis up the chimney.
You, on the other hand, were out of the country, or so you say,
and so couldn’t possibly have witnessed the flare
that in fact no one saw, and can get on with it. My
conscience is clear. I’m hungry, and lunch, or supper, is waiting.
II
Between sleep and rubbish is the remembrance,
scent to one who can smell. What a relief, though—if snow flies
and they decide to walk back into it, that will make one more game.
Yes, mon chou, the way it is has been decided. When they come up for air
at the same moment, a truce is called,
and the staircase draped with shagreen. Others
than they may of course make decisions, but only in the infinity
of ways which concern us. We blacked out for a moment.
Still others avoid laxatives and beef. We cannot logically condone
headway in the matter. I said you brought back library books
that were due on June 23, 1924, and you owe me four trillion eight hundred
thousand twenty-three cents. Luckily a moratorium
was introduced in the last decade, forgiveness was invented,
and you are free to sulk by the ladder.
As it was I took the elevator to the top,
walked around and didn’t see anything and came back down.
Then, acting on a hunch, I went up much faster
than the first time, and spotted two lovers entwined on the horizon,
but let them go, training the big bertha instead on a rabbit
limping across hallowed ground, was dismissed, took early retirement instead
to avoid embarrassment all round, and now am as you see me:
a blind cook serving pornographic muffins to paying guests
over cocktails before the sea opens and drinks us, then closes over us,
smacking its lips like an idiot.
III
Everything from soup to nuts is OK with me. Her bust came
buckled to Dad’s breeches, someone in trouble.
Halving and having a new thing are the same.
I always preferred him, he was a wreck, superior to the comm
on man,
but oh so separate. If he had dimples,
everybody had to have them. If he went to bed with someone
everybody else had to too. It was his summer of fun.
The fashions “dictated” a lot of things just then, we were cool
with that. Some of you might think of life as some kind of upper berth
on a honeymoon. Marriage on stilts. The absolute truth is,
no one’s going to look at you once it’s done.
We may as well refresh ourselves—the chase soon comes to a head,
though not for long, as Galileo’s orange teaches.
The truth is always a bit further on, and sits there.
No one can read the expression
on its supplanted face.
The third monster seemed to think it was his turn to say something. “Well ...”
“Folks I can’t go on like this, that is, you can’t.
Whoever suffers fate’s naughty cudgel ought to come clean.
Otherwise there’s no explanation, and that cannot be,
as we know. In some other life siphoned out of this one with a tube we can all
kiss our masters, for that day anything is play.
The raddled cowslips of diverted energy have a vested interest in us.
The team partly owns a share of each one of us. Go figure. Ask Neptune.
And insofar as I count, I’m lowering the iron shutter
on today’s wares. God help us if he comes along. But if he doesn’t
we shall be sisters all the same, tame in embroidery, yet resistant
where least expected. My dog speaks proof. I can ladle surf too,
I used to be a bathhouse attendant. I got good grades in math.
Didn’t get into the college of my choosing. Oh well. It’s triste,
the drain choked with tumbleweed, mascara on the clouds, the wooden false fronts
of our little downtown, only we hadn’t left it this way, and ought not to foregather
as darkness falls and the real fur flies. You get caught out at night.”
The girl in the drawing said it and made it happen to me,
then turned over.
The nexus of the star is a superbrain
that can take in you and me and not be mottled or disturbed,
while we lead quiet, shadowed lives. Insignificance is all we have.
The colors, dark ocean maroon, we belong to in the sense that earth belongs to us,
more reassurance, and when day collapses it’s the same—a plight
that is a solution. That’s why I can never go back to philosophy—
its halls and chambers are a paradigm of emptiness, not the real thing,
for only under stones is the knowledge
of underneath, and my desire is mammoth.
So it’s decided. I’ll pack my suitcase
or something, we have the tickets.
Someday I’ll get you there, I know this, the flaming artery obstructs
but not that much, chestnuts still bask in the fire.
But when it came time to sample other essences
she had absconded, wasn’t behind the goalpost.
In this way, rhizome-like, life gets added to life until there is no backing down,
and again tackles its dull awareness of today’s
not remembering our names, only faces.
But there’s no mistaking their intent.
The missile had locked on its prey, houses are swept
for weddings, they cry and can’t alter anything.
We each had an appetizer, the pupils left.
My tetrahedron is open to the night.
(“But was it hinted that brains slant otherwise?
That a draft of cunning will get you into the fair,
where, as long as you keep quiet, you can own great, quivering beasts?
That one’s breath on the moat ignores the shoulders of pike,
and once more the canon desires what it devours,
made to come round again? That we were cousins once in Duluth?
That there is scrimping out there where buzzards plow
the greenery and bellboys interrupt? I’ll be my own vast placebo.
Twilight comes with a rush and wet plumbing.
There is more to our story, more to the telling of it—”)
The unbuilt demands added attention. We got swept along,
and you never learned Jay’s last name. Perhaps it was Jay.
Evening ebbed on the hour.
The newspaper arrived by pigeon post,
as might be. We loved hot food. There is something else
for you and me. Sighed the voyante. And they wonder why it didn’t
taste just right. With dead milk. But surely that
was an inning, it had to be. We had all worked so hard. It comes over me,
all this loss, and then the time. Added to your hours. For a few thrilling minutes
she came and sat by us. “For now, it’s all right. The children would have wanted
you to be this way, happy. But the older I get the harder
beyond which is an extension of everything, see? You do see.
I’ll leave you the latchkey, at last. Don’t hesitate to use it.
Don’t call me. Or see anything wrong with this.” Like a charming
serpent, she took her leave, with one half of us in suspense,
the other clotured. But it was turning out this way. I knew it all
along, in the hallway of your dwelling. You shouldn’t make such noises
and not mean them. There’ll come a day when we’ll live off noise,
but for now the square forecourt is overgrown. I’ve loved some things in my time,
cast others aside, let others fall by the wayside. The feast such
as we now reap it is heavy, indistinct. Their voices blur. They could croon.
Each to the other thinks: It’s gone. But rotten. Days will
go on turning themselves inside out for us, and trees warble for us,
but not often and not very well.
SIR GAMMER VANS
Last Sunday morning at six o’clock in the evening as I was sailing
over the tops of the mountains in my little boat a crew-cut stranger
saluted me, so I asked him, could he tell me whether the little old
woman was dead yet who
was hanged last Saturday week for drowning herself in a shower of feathers?
“Ask Monk Lewis what he thinks ‘been there done that’ means in the so-called
evening of life. Chances are he’ll regale you with chess moves. All I
want is my damn prescription.” “And you shall have it, sir,” he answered
in a level voice. So he gave me a slice of beer and a cup of cold veal
and there was this little dog.
I see no reason to be more polite when the sun has passed its zenith,
yet ham radio operators infest every cove, defacing walls with their palaver.
And when two swans come to that, one swoons and is soothed.
The other lost inside a wall.
He seemed to think I knew some secret or other pertaining to the botched
logs in the fireplace. This caused him to avoid me I think
for a twelvemonth.
After which we got down to business and actually signed the contract.
He was inconsolable. The brat had cost him. With two wives and another
on the way wouldn’t commit himself to a used Chevy. Which is
understandable I think I said it’s understandable. The man
was in no mood to entertain these distinctions. At least I thought he said
bring on the heavy artillery the dream is now or
it won’t happen, not in my diary. Well why that’s just what
I think too, I blessed him. Cells in the wind. The sucker’ll be all
over our new templates, smearing them with grape honey, I’ll
challenge you for the right to beleaguer. To which he assented
abstractedly and it was over in a thrush. Not to ... well excuse me
too. Curses I’d already signed on,
there was no need to jump for it, put a good face on it. Mild eyes
expressing a child’s dignity. OK for it to rot, it
was pompous to begin with.
“No, don’t hang him,” says he, for he killed a hare yesterday. And if you
don’t believe me I’ll show you the hare alive in a basket.
So they built a pontoon bridge, and when they had crossed over the fish applauded.
I was aghast, lost forty pounds at the gaming tables of the
Channel Islands, ’sblood I said. So I set fire to my bow, poised my arrow,
and shot amongst them. I broke seventeen ribs on one side,
and twenty-one and a half on the other; but my arrow passed clean through
without ever touching it, and the worst was I lost my arrow;
however I found it again in the hollow of a tree. I felt it; it felt
clammy. I smelt it; it smelt honey.
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.