Shadow Train
Page 4
Transformations, before it came to seem as though it could not be done.
Cats were curious about it. They followed it
Down into the glen where it was last seen.
School of Velocity
Urban propinquities extrude a wood-pegged
(In the imperialist taste) balcony just above
The heads of penitents as their parade
Turns the corner and is seen no more. Coleridge-Taylor
Or a hare-shaped person is somehow involved;
His aquarelle takes on meaning, and a cloud
Is suddenly torn asunder so that the green heartbreak
Of the eternally hysterical sun hoses down the gutters
And tender walkways where we first became aware
Of a confession and trees that were on one side only.
Probably they wear out the light with too much fussing
Otherwise and yet the landscape looks strangely neglected.
An orphan. We are overheard,
As usual. We’re sorry, I say. The houses, the puddles,
Even the cars are pegs. One who noticed the street flooded
Calls out in time. Tomorrow the procession returns, and what then?
Frontispiece
Expecting rain, the profile of a day
Wears its soul like a hat, prow up
Against the deeply incised clouds and regions
Of abrupt skidding from cold to cold, riddles
Of climate it cannot understand.
Sometimes toward the end
A look of longing broke, taut, from those eyes
Meeting yours in final understanding, late,
And often, too, the beginnings went unnoticed
As though the story could advance its pawns
More discreetly thus, overstepping
The confines of ordinary health and reason
To introduce in another way
Its fact into the picture. It registered,
It must be there. And so we turn the page over
To think of starting. This is all there is.
Everyman’s Library
… the sparrow hath found an house,
and the swallow a nest for herself…
PSALM 84
In the outlying districts where we know something
The sparrows don’t, and each house
Is noticeably a little nicer than the rest, the “package”
Is ready to be performed now. It comes
As a sheaf of papyruslike, idle imaginings
And identifyings, and stays put like that.
It’s beginning to get darker. You send someone
Down the flight of stairs to ask after
The true course of events and the answer always
Comes back evasive yet polite: you have only to step down…
Oops, the light went out. That is the paper-thin
But very firm dimension of ordinary education. And when a thief
Is out there, in the dark somewhere, it also applies.
There is no freedom, and no freedom from freedom.
The only possible act is to pick up the book, caress it
And open it in my face. You knew that.
Shadow Train
Violence, how smoothly it came
And smoothly took you with it
To wanting what you nonetheless did not want.
It’s all over if we don’t see the truth inside that meaning.
To want is to be better than before. To desire what is
Forbidden is permitted. But to desire it
And not want it is to chew its name like a rag.
To that end the banana shakes on its stem,
But the strawberry is liquid and cool, a rounded
Note in the descending scale, a photograph
Of someone smiling at a funeral. The great plumes
Of the dynastic fly-whisk lurch daily
Above our heads, as far up as clouds. Who can say
What it means, or whether it protects? Yet it is clear
That history merely stretches today into one’s private guignol.
The violence dreams. You are half-asleep at your instrument table.
But Not That One
The works, the days, uh,
And weariness of the days
Gradually getting a little longer,
Turning out to be a smile, everything
Like that. And it does make a difference,
Oh it does. Because the smile is a different not us,
Ready to rescind, cancel,
Rip out the stitches of the sky,
Then it warmed up. O a lot
Blooms, gets squashed on the tongue:
Where are you going? Who do you think you are?
Crushed leaves, berries, the stars
Continually falling, streaking the sky:
Can it be the context? No, it is old and
Sometimes the agog spectator wrenches a cry
From its own house. He thought he heard.
The Vegetarians
In front of you, long tables leading down to the sun,
A great gesture building. You accept it so as to play with it
And translate when its attention is deflated for the one second
Of eternity. Extreme patience and persistence are required,
Yet everybody succeeds at this before being handed
The surprise box lunch of the rest of his life. But what is
Truly startling is that it all happens modestly in the vein of
True living, and then that too is translated into something
Floating up from it, signals that life flashed, weak but essential
For uncorking the tone, and now lost, recently but forever.
In Zurich everything was pure and purposeful, like the red cars
Swung around the lake on wires, against the sky, then back down
Through the weather. Which resembles what you want to do
No more than black tree trunks do, though you thought of it.
Therefore our legends always come around to seeming legendary,
A path decorated with our comings and goings. Or so I’ve been told.
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.
Grateful acknowlegment is made to the following publications, in which some of the poems in this book originally appeared: Issues (Brown University), “Catalpas”; New York Review of Books, “Qualm” and “Caesura”; The New Yorker, “The Pursuit of Happiness”; Times Literary Supplement, “Para
doxes and Oxymorons,” “Or in My Throat,” and “A Pact with Sullen Death”; Yale Review: “Tide Music” and “Unusual Precautions”; Zero: “Night Life” and “But Not That One.”
Copyright © 1980, 1981 by John Ashbery
Cover design by Mimi Bark
978-1-4804-5911-3
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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