by John Ashbery
Indifferently then, but perhaps more accurately,
And once it was over we knew
What to do with it. We carried out
Our neighbors’ lives and they had our
Instructions about where to go. We lived
Inadequately, blushing, but we knew we were
On the outside and that only one thing
Prevented us from traveling inward, and that
Thing was our knowledge of how little we imagined
Everything. As though a door
Were enough to stop the average person and he
Would just curl up on the doormat forever.
But this
Person turned out to be mass-produced. He was funny
And knew about elegance, how to dress
For an occasion, yet the error that incites us
To duplication was missing, or inexact. We have
Not spoken to him. It should be outrageous
To do so. Yet to ignore him will bring no light.
But to get it right
We might ask this once: how goes it
Down there? What objects
Have you found recently?
“There are no trade winds. The ocean too
Is someone’s idea. The pleasant banter of
The elements cannot disguise this basically
Thin concept, nor remove us from
Contemplation of it, and that is the best
Answer that may precede the question. Until later
When the shooting fires light up the sides
Of the volcano and each task and catastrophe
Become clear and succinct. By that time kindness
Will have replaced effort.”
Why keep on seeding the chairs
When the future is night and no one knows what
He wants? It would probably be best though
To hang on to these words if only
For the rhyme. Little enough,
But later on, at the summit, it won’t
Matter so much that they fled like arrows
From the taut string of a restrained
Consciousness, only that they mattered.
For the present, our not-knowing
Delights them. Probably they won’t be devoured
By the lions, like the others, but be released
After a certain time. Meanwhile, keep
Careful count of the rows of windows overlooking
The deep blue sky behind the factory: we’ll need them.
I
So this must be a hole
Of cloud,
Mandate or trap
But haze that casts
The milk of enchantment
Over the whole town,
Its scenery, whatever
Could be happening
Behind tall hedges
Of dark, lissome knowledge.
The brown lines persist
In explicit sex
Matters like these
No one can care about,
“Noone.” That is I’ve said it
Before and no one
Remembers except that elf.
Around us are signposts
Pointing to the past,
The old-fashioned, pointed
Wooden kind. And nothing directs
To the present that is
About to happen.
These traumas
That sped us on our way
Are to be linked with the invisible damage
Resulting in the future
From too much direction,
Too many coils
Of remembrance, too much arbitration.
And the sun shines
On all of it
Fairly and equitably.
It was a way of getting to see the world
At minimal cost and without
Risk
But it can no longer stand up to
That.
The fences are barrel staves
Surrounding, encroaching on
The pattern of the city,
The formula that once made sense to
A few of us until it became
The end.
The magic has left the
Drawings finally.
They blow around the rest—tumbleweed
In a small western ghost town
That sometimes hits and sometimes misses.
That tower of lightning high over
The Sahara Desert could have missed you,
An experience
Unlike any other, leaching
Back into the lore of
The songs and sagas,
The warp of knowledge.
But now it’s
Come close
Strict identities form it,
Build it up like sheaves
Of nerves, articulate,
Defiant of itself.
The posse had seen them
Pass by like a caravan
In slow motion,
Elephants and wolves
Painted bright colors,
Hardly visible
Through the cistern of shade
Of a hand held up to the eye.
Now that they are gone and
To be dreamed of
A new alertness changes
Into the look of things
Placed on the railing
Of this terrace:
The beheld with all the potential
Of the visible, acting
To release itself
Into the known
Dust under
The sky.
Hands where it took place
Moving over the nebulous
Keyboard: the heft
Now invisible, only the fragments
Of the echo are left
Intruding into the color,
How we remember them.
How quickly the years pass
To next year’s sun
In the mountain family.
All the barriers are loaded
With fruit and flowers
At the same time.
The leaves stumble up to
Intercept the light one last time
Outnumbering the sheaves,
Even the ants on the anthill,
Black line leading to
The cake of disasters,
Leading outward to encircle the profit
Of laughter and ending of all the tales
In an explosion of surprise and marbled
Opinions as the sun closes in
Building darkness.
In later editions you
Were called, casual, harsh,
Dispensing arbitrary edicts
Under present law
Timed and always sunk in the
Gnat-embroiled shade.
It was in fact a colossal
Desert full of valleys and
Melting canyons and soared
Under the heaving of sighs
Knowing it would all end
But never end, but exist
In the memory of itself turned to flesh
Of ice cream and sting
Without obliteration.
But as I see it you
Can only amble on, not free
Nor on a journey, appearing
Though at some later
Juncture
Of our tepid and insidious
Greeting:
The shock of the path
Worn like this
Never scaled
Beyond a certain point
And returning and returning
Like a pole pointed to the sky.
In some Greek
Coves barely under the water
Or barely inundated (you might say)
A ball was found, and stated
The body’s predilection to it:
There is no more history you
Seem to say no more June.
The blue wraith that stands
Stra
ight above each chimney: forget it!
It is almost gone,
Has almost departed.
Now the dry, half-seen pods
Are layered, and the beating
Of an old man in some dungeon.
No one sees how fast its processes
Whiz, until some day
When things are better.
Who can elicit these possible,
Rubbery spirals? Return of all that’s new,
Antithesis chirping
To antithesis: let’s climb
The roof, look out over all
That was so near and is:
Vanity of the dishpan,
The radio chortling succor to moved
Behemoths of sense shredding
Underwear and ulcers alike
In a past of no mean confection:
This wound like a small wall
Of ceramic intent:
It is meant to hound you
With its brothers in the afterlight
Of forest prisms, the brown sky sweeping
Unusually
Away. The cavern this time is big enough to fit in:
The broken apse
Wind slams through, the snail-sexton
With rheumy specs, dung beetle bringing up the rear:
Who could explain it?
Who could have explained it?
“Only pluralism ...” but we get
Far less for our money that way.
Aye, and fewer replies too
To sopping prayer-strips
Hanging like dejected plumage from that
Rafter over the porch swing.
They are anxious to be done with us,
For the interview to be over, and we,
We have just begun.
Yet I too
Was once captured this way.
How it became a delight
To think about it and when
Pain intervened, as usual,
The calm remained, held over
From the other time
And no broken trace was seen.
Now houses have been razed
Where once fields of vegetables
Stood; nothing’s there
That cannot truly be
And was all along
Yet never was for the seeing,
The tasting that jabs back
Into the past as well,
For what is present savoring?
Mouthing of initials, of a career?
There is no case
For samurai, or witches’ coattails,
But so long as the buoyant opening
Of a vacant career stand around healthily
There is no need to ascertain
The pink and red paper stratosphere
Balloons pasted a little crazily
Against a teetering sky
Where color cannot have ever been.
There was another photograph
In that album, but not so amusing
To remember or to describe:
Three dark women
On a swerving path that saucily
Pulled the rug out from under the spectator.
And the three expressions faded or
Were never there to begin with, picking
Up a little strength perhaps from the exhausted
Eye that watched them, guardedly.
And all it said was, we are stones
To be like this and never to be able
To reveal, being forward like this, but we can say
How repellent was the adumbration
That lodged us here, around
Our holes, and did not
Shove us away, but rather
As with brave looks out to sea
Left everything here to crumble,
Whether new and fine, or old
Or like us, not new nor old
Having no share in the time-cusp
That keeps you and they running here to imagined
Meetings as though some sense were here
In the fences and the privileged
Omissions of the frolic grass.
A close one.
I haven’t seen him
Since I’ve been here.
Only an aftertaste of medicine
And subtle pressures put
Beyond this lattice that is
As narrow as the visible universe.
A whisper directs:
How many homeless,
Wandering, improvisatory
As new deserts move up
Into the constellation that was
Only a moment ago.
Straggling players reverse
The indications:
Lutes, feathers, hard
Leather berries fall:
The autumn in the spring
Again with July sandwiched
In the middle, lament
Of all the days from the least popular
To the most sought after, the play
Forever turning on itself:
Refrains, the spirit of sorrow
Begin it; duration
Only conjugates, the last happening
Is seen as inadequate only after the passing
Of much else varied stuff
Only in being turned inside out
Can it deny itself so that the meaning
Pierces in any given point
And in the texture of the sea, O
Sky-blue-violet raiment given
Not to be heeded
Only as an oblique arch through which sails
Perpendicular
The speeding hollow bullet of these times
Of mud and velvet, these
Choreographed intrusions.
Farther from far away
No more the colored echoes ring
On the afternoon groundswell already dissolved
In the thousands of hastening
Feet of birds and raindrops
In wasted penitence sucked back
Up to the crest again
From which the view is fine as views go
From low, stubby towers
Of which there aren’t too many
Here
Like cash registers in a darkened store
Even as afresh dawn approaches, before
The winds come.
Further on up only birches
Grow and the red sweater
Is for you. You breathing
Into the angle of shadow in sunlight
Of the frosted kiosk that was taken
By men with tools and a surveying kit.
That was long after
The night out on the glacier.
In the morning the children and kittens ran around.
It wasn’t necessary to remind us
Once we were seated at our desks in the school
Under the giant tree-roots sheathed
In moss about the quartz lightning
Tumbling down the bed of the stream
As on a stair. We were quick and ready
For level plant-games in the sun
That arrived just at noon as a horizontal line.
The error was in the hollowed-out, weed-choked
Afternoon and even it was only confession
Of too many strands of vagueness, neuters
Too independent of each other and yet
Abashed with the other heretics like ourselves:
Clusters of black inkberries sweeping the horizon
And we always prepared for a fight
Yet so innocent we have no place to go.
The spaces between the teeth told you
That the smile hung like an aria on the mind
And all effort came into being
Only to yank it away
Came at it
Hard as the lines of citrus planted
In firm yet wavering rows
All across the land to the water.
Bells were rung
For some members of the fam
ily only,
These relatives like scarlet trees who infested
The background but were not much more than
The dust as it is seen
In folds of the furniture,
These were the ones who were always
Pushing out toward the Pacific coast—what
A time we all had of it, but all that part
Is over, in a chapter
That somehow has passed us by. And yet, I wonder.
Certainly the academy has performed
A useful function. Where else could
Tiny flecks of plaster float almost
Forever in innocuous sundown almost
Fashionable as the dark probes again.
An open beak is shadowed against the
Small liturgical opera this time.
It is nobody’s fault. And the academy
Has saved it all for remembering.
It performs another useful function:
Pointing out the way at the beginning
When everybody giggled nervously and
Got lost against the peach-fuzz sky
Where too many nice miracles were always
Happening and the blood-colored ground
Grasped them like straws, for a minute.
There was a smoother, less ambiguous way
To be determined and its banners shook like smoke
To become an arch of the bridge
And the bridge was acknowledged in good time
But never to this day
As its echo in the sky performing to meet it
Behind invisible cataracts and cloud catafalques
And yet, the carrion still
Steams here, the mote
Pursues the eye, and all is other and the same
Of which the rite dismantles bit by bit
The blind empathy
Of a homeland. It emerges as a firm
Enigma, burnished, filled in.
Furthermore, there was nothing like
Shadows of oranges
In the new game, nothing fanciful
And abstract one step away from foggy
Reality. The series were all sisters
Back in the fifties when more of this
Sort of thing was allowed. Two could
Go on at once without special permission
And the dreams were responsible to no base
Of authority but could wander on for
Short distances into the amazing nearness
That the world seemed to be. Sometimes
We would all sing together
And at night people would take leave of each other
And go into their houses, singing.
It was a time of rain and Hawaii
And tears big as crystals. A time
Of reading and listening to the wireless.
We never should have parted, you and me.
II
Something I read once
In some poem reminded me of it:
The dark, wet street
(It gets dark at seven now)
Gleaming, ecstatic, with the thin spear
Of faerie trumpet-calls. A lullaby
That is an exclamation.
It cannot be found
As when the whole sky shifts and stays