Shadow Train

by John Ashbery

  No reply for your question, but that’s understandable. All she had to do was lie.

  Corky’s Car Keys

  Despite, or because

  Of its rambunctiousness, Kevin and Tracy—only appearances

  Matter much—lingered in the not-night, red-painted brick background

  Of festivals. And trees, old

  Trees, like that one—sweet white dreams

  Contain them, “in and out the windows.”

  Are the sunsets faster, now in old age, now

  That you are inundated with them, or with something

  To know me better? Yet despite, or because of, that, we have

  To live here, so we should fix

  This place up. A long time ago, in some earlier revival,

  It seemed one of many handsome, felicitous choices—

  How quickly the years pass. How could we tell the sound

  Of the city at night would grow up too? And in its uncomfortable

  Maturity dictate pyramids, process orders? Yet we can regulate

  Everything in a little while, if he is truly the steeple.

  Night Life

  I thought it was you but I couldn’t tell.

  It’s so hard, working with people, you want them all

  To like you and be happy, but they get in the way

  Of their own predilections, it’s like a stone

  Blocking the mouth of a cave. And when you say, come on let’s

  Be individuals reveling in our separateness, yet twined

  Together at the top by our hair, like branches, then it’s OK

  To go down into the garden at night and smoke cigarettes,

  Except that nothing cares about the obstacles, the gravity

  You had to overcome to reach this admittedly unimpressive

  Stage in the chain of delusions leading to your freedom,

  Or is that just one more delusion? Yet I like the way

  Your hair is cropped, it’s important, the husky fragrance

  Breaking out of your voice, when I’ve talked too long

  On the phone, addressing the traffic from my balcony

  Again, launched far out over the thin ice once it begins to smile.

  Written in the Dark

  Telling it five, six, seven times a day,

  Telling it like a bedtime story no one knows,

  Telling it like a fortune, that happened a short time ago,

  Like yesterday afternoon, so recently that it seems not to have

  Quite happened yet…. All these and more were ways

  Our love assumed to look like a state religion,

  Like political wisdom. It’s too bad that the two hands

  Clenched between us fail us in their concreteness,

  That we need some slogan to transform it all into autumn

  Banners streaming, into flutter of bronze oak leaves, a surface

  As intense and inquisitive as that of the sea. We stayed home.

  We drank table wine, yellow then violet, wormwood color,

  Color of the sound of waves sweeping across a flat beach

  Farther than ever before, taking greater liberties in the name

  Of liberty. But it shouldn’t. Don’t you see how there can be

  Exceptions, even to this, this firmament, graciousness that is home?

  Caesura

  Job sat in a corner of the dump eating asparagus

  With one hand and scratching his unsightly eruptions

  With the other. Pshaw, it’d blow over. In the office

  They’d like discussing it. His thoughts

  Were with the office now: how protected it was,

  Though still a place to work. Sit up straight, the

  Monitor inside said. It worked for a second

  But didn’t improve the posture of his days, taken

  As a cross section of the times. Correction: of our time.

  And it was (it was again): “Have you made your list up?

  I have one ambulance three nuns two (black-

  And-white list) cops dressed as Keystone Kops lists, a red light

  At leafy intersection list.” Then it goes blank, pulp-color.

  Until at the end where they give out the list

  Of awardees. The darkness and light have returned. It was still

  The weather of the soul, vandalized, out-at-elbow. A blight. Spared, though.

  The Leasing of September

  The sleeping map lay green, and we who were never much

  To begin with, except for what the attractiveness of youth

  Contributed, stood around in the pastures of heaped-up, thickened

  White light, convinced that the story was coming to a close,

  Otherwise why all these figurines, the Latin freemasonry in the corners?

  You stepped into a blue taxi, and as I swear my eyes were in keeping

  With the beauty of you as they saw it, so a swallow perpetuated

  In dove-gray dusk can be both the end and the exaltation of a new

  Beginning, yet forever remain itself, as you

  Seem to run alongside me as the car picks up speed. Is it

  Your hand then? Will I always then return

  To the tier upon tier of cloth layered in the closet

  Against what departure? Even a departure from the normal?

  So we are not recognized, under the metal. But to him

  The love was a solid object, like a partly unpacked trunk,

  As it was then, which is different now when remembered.

  On the Terrace of Ingots

  It was the bitterness of the last time

  That only believers and fools take for the next time

  Proposing itself as a chore against an expressionist

  Backdrop of skylights and other believed finial nourishes, and

  You wash your hands, become a duct to drain off

  All the suffering of the age you thought you had

  Put behind you in defining it, but the sense mounts

  Slowly in the words as in a hygrometer—that day

  You stood apart from the class in the photograph.

  The trees seemed to make a little sense, more precious

  Than anything on earth. For the clamor

  Was drawing it all away, as in a parade; you saw

  How much smaller it all kept getting. And the fathers

  Failed. I don’t think it would be different today

  If we are alone up here. The flares of today

  Aren’t like suffering either, yet are almost everyone.

  Tide Music

  Again in the autumn there is a case for it,

  The tastelessness that just curls up and sometimes dies

  At the edge of certain thoughtful, uneventful sidewalks.

  In the afternoon you can hear what you can’t see, all around,

  The patterns of distress settling into rings

  Of warm self-satisfaction and disbelief, as though

  The whole surface of the air and the morrow were scored

  Over and over with a nail as heavy rains

  Pounded the area, until underneath all was revealed as mild,

  Transient shining, the way a cloud dissolves

  Around the light that is of its own making, hard as it is

  To believe, and as though the welcoming host in you had

  For some reason left the door to the street open and all

  Kinds of amiable boors had taken advantage of it, though the mat

  Isn’t out. All the sky, each ragged leaf, have been thoroughly gone over

  And every inch is accounted for in the tune, the wallpaper of dreams.

  Unusual Precautions

  “We, we children, why our lives are circumscribed, circumferential;

  Close, too close to the center, we are haunted by perimeters

  And our lives seem to go in and out, in and out all the time,

  As though yours were diagonal, vertical, shallow, chopped off

/>   At the root like the voice of the famous gadfly: ‘Oh! Aho!’ it

  Sits in the middle of the roadway. That’s it. Worry and brown desk

  Stain it by infusion. There aren’t enough tags at the end,

  And the grove is blind, blossoming, but we are too porous to hear it.

  It’s like watching a movie of a nightmare, the many episodes

  That defuse the thrust of what comes to us. The girl who juggled Indian clubs

  Belongs again to the paper space that backs the black

  Curtain, as though there were a reason to have paid for these seats.

  Tomorrow you’ll be walking in a white park. Our interests

  Are too close for us to see. There seems to be no

  Necessity for it, yet in walking, we too, around, and all around

  We’ll come to one, where the street crosses your name, and feet run up it.”

  Flow Blue

  It may sound like a lot of odds and cloud-filled

  Ends—at best, a thinking man’s charmed fragment, perhaps

  A house. And it could be that father and sky—

  Moments so far gone into decay, as well as barely

  Rating entry into a stonemason’s yard—from the very first moment

  Need no persuading: we know that the sky sits,

  That these are sculptures of singular detail

  Separate to a particular society. The black jell-like

  Substance pours from the eye into the tower in the field,

  Making uneasy acceptance. There were differences when

  Only you knew them, and the grass was gray, escaping the houses,

  The septic tank and the fields. Lost, I found the small stand

  In the wood. It was funny and quiet there. And I know now how

  This is not a place where I could stay. The endless ladder being carried

  Past our affairs, like strings in a hop-field, decants

  A piano-tuning we feed on as it dances us to the edge.

  Hard Times

  Trust me. The world is run on a shoestring.

  They have no time to return the calls in hell

  And pay dearly for those wasted minutes. Somewhere

  In the future it will filter down through all the proceedings

  But by then it will be too late, the festive ambience

  Will linger on but it won’t matter. More or less

  Succinctly they will tell you what we’ve all known for years:

  That the power of this climate is only to conserve itself.

  Whatever twists around it is decoration and can never

  Be looked at as something isolated, apart. Get it? And

  He flashed a mouthful of aluminum teeth there in the darkness

  To tell however it gets down, that it does, at last.

  Once they made the great trip to California

  And came out of it flushed. And now every day

  Will have to dispel the notion of being like all the others.

  In time, it gets to stand with the wind, but by then the night is closed off.

  “Moi, je suis la tulipe…”

  And you get two of everything. Twin tunics, the blue

  And the faded. And are wise for today, allowing as how people,

  Dressing up in their way, will repeat your blunder out of kindness

  So it won’t happen again. Seriously, the magazines speak of you,

  Mention you, a lot. I have seen the articles and the ads recently.

  Your name is on everyone’s lips. Nobody comes to see us, because

  You have to forget yourself in order to forget other people,

  At which point the game is under way. My personality fades away

  As dreams evaporate by day, which stays, with the dream

  Materials in solution, cast out in a fiery precipitate

  Later with people on their way, on parade in a way, and all kinds

  Of things. All men are ambiguous and

  They sometimes have hairy chests, in a long line

  Of decayed and decaying ancestors. Fine in my time, I

  Know that I am still, but that there is a blur around

  The hole that hatches me into reason, surprised, somewhat, but sure.

  Catalpas

  All around us an extraordinary effort is being made.

  Something is in the air. The tops of trees are trying

  To speak to this. The audience for these events is amazed,

  Can’t believe them, yet is walking in its sleep,

  By twos and threes, on the ramparts in the moonlight.

  Understanding must be introduced now, at no matter what cost.

  Nature wants us to understand in many ways

  That the age of noyades is over, although danger still lurks

  In the enormous effrontery that appearances put on things,

  And will continue to for some time. But all this comes as no surprise;

  You knew the plot before, and expected to arrive in this place

  At the appointed time, and now it’s almost over, even

  As it’s erupting in huge blankets of forms and solemn,

  Candy-colored ideas that you recognize as your own,

  Only they look so strange up there on the stage, like the light

  That shines through sleep. And the third day ends.

  We Hesitate

  The days to come are a watershed.

  You have to improve your portrait of God

  To make it plain. It is on the list,

  You and your bodies are on the line.

  The new past now unfurls like a great somber hope

  Above the treeline, like a giant’s hand

  Placed tentatively on the hurrying clouds.

  The basins come to be full and complex

  But it is not enough. Concern and embarrassment

  Grow rank. Once they have come home there is no cursing.

  Fires disturb the evening. No one can hear the story.

  Or sometimes people just forget

  Like a child. It took me months

  To get that discipline banned, and what is the use,

  To ban that? You remain a sane, yet sophisticated, person:

  Rooted in twilight, dreaming, a piece of traffic.

  The Desperado

  What kind of life is this that we are leading

  That so much strong vagary can slip by unnoticed?

  Is there a future? It seems that all we’d planned

  To find in it is rolling around now, spending itself.

  You step aside, and the rock invasion from the fifties

  Dissipates in afternoon smoke. And disco

  Retreats a little, wiping large brown eyes.

  They come along here. Now, all will be gone.

  I am the shadowed, widower, the unconsoled.

  But if it weren’t for me I should also be the schoolmaster

  Coaching, pruning young spring thoughts

  Surprised to be here, in this air.

  But their barely restrained look suits the gray

  Importance of what we expect to be confronted with

  Any day. Send the odious one a rebuke. Can one deny

  Any longer that it is, and going to be?

  The Image of the Shark Confronts the Image of the Little Match Girl

  With a stool on your head you

  Again find yourself in that narrow alley

  That threads the whole center of the city.

  “They’re not nice people today is not nice”

  Is the austere bleat and the helpful hints

  On the back are overlooked, just as before.

  I know whose agents have set feet on this way,

  This time. And the sky is unforgettable.

  Take a sip of your mother’s drink. It was told

  Long ago in the Borodin string quartet how the mists

  And certain other parts of antediluvian forests still

  Hassle this downtown mysteriously, and somet
imes

  The voice of reason is heard for a hard, clear moment,

  Then falls still, if for no other reason than

  That the sheriff’s deputies have suddenly coincided

  With a collective notion of romance, and the minute has absconded.

  Songs Without Words

  Yes, we had gone down to the shore

  That year and were waiting for the expected to happen

  According to a preordained system of its own devising.

  Its people were there for decoration,

  Like notes arranged on a staff. What you made of them

  Depended on your ability to read music and to hear more

  In the night behind them. It gave us

  A kind of amplitude. And the watchmen were praying

  So long before rosy-fingered dawn began to mess around

  With the horizon that you wondered, yet

  It made a convenient bridge to pass over, from starlight

  To the daylit kingdom. I don’t think it would have been any different

  If the ships hadn’t been there, poised, flexing their muscles,

  Ready to take us where they pleased and that country had been

  Rehabilitated and the sirens, la la, stopped singing

  And canceled our melting protection from the sun.

  Indelible, Inedible

  Work had been proceeding at a snail’s pace

  Along the river, and now that the spring torrents had begun

  We kept our distance from the mitered flashing,

  The easy spoke-movement of the hopeless expanse

  Caught, way out in the distance, with a thread of meaning

  Which was fear. Some things are always left undecided

  And regroup, to reappear next year in a new light,

  The light of change. And the moods are similar

  Too the second time around, only more easy of access.

  You can talk to each other, sheltered now,

  As though just inside the flap of a big circus tent

  And leave whenever you want to. Nothing could be easier.

  That was then. And its enduring lasted through many