As We Know

by John Ashbery

  Taking away a little bit of us each time

  To be deposited elsewhere

  In the place of our involvement

  With the core that brought excessive flowering this year

  Of enormous sunsets and big breezes

  That left you feeling too simple

  Like an island just off the shore, one of many, that no one

  Notices, though it has a certain function, though an abstract one

  Built to prevent you from being towed to shore.

  Late Echo

  Alone with our madness and favorite flower

  We see that there really is nothing left to write about.

  Or rather, it is necessary to write about the same old things

  In the same way, repeating the same things over and over

  For love to continue and be gradually different.

  Beehives and ants have to be reexamined eternally

  And the color of the day put in

  Hundreds of times and varied from summer to winter

  For it to get slowed down to the pace of an authentic

  Saraband and huddle there, alive and resting.

  Only then can the chronic inattention

  Of our lives drape itself around us, conciliatory

  And with one eye on those long tan plush shadows

  That speak so deeply into our unprepared knowledge

  Of ourselves, the talking engines of our day.

  And I’d Love You To Be in It

  Playing alone, I found the wall.

  One side was gray, the other an indelible gray.

  The two sides were separated by a third,

  Or spirit wall, a coarser gray. The wall

  Was chipped and tarnished in places,

  Polished in places.

  I wanted to put it behind me

  By walking beside it until it ended.

  This was never done. Meanwhile

  I stayed near the wall, touching the two ends.

  With all of my power of living

  I am forced to lie on the floor.

  To have reached the cleansing end of the journey,

  Appearances put off forever, in my new life

  There is still no freedom, but excitement

  Turns in our throats like woodsmoke.

  In what skyscraper or hut

  I’ll finish? Today there are tendrils

  Coming through the slats, and milky, yellowy grapes,

  A mild game to divert the doorperson

  And we are swiftly inside, the resurrection finished.

  Tapestry

  It is difficult to separate the tapestry

  From the room or loom which takes precedence over it.

  For it must always be frontal and yet to one side.

  It insists on this picture of “history”

  In the making, because there is no way out of the punishment

  It proposes: sight blinded by sunlight.

  The seeing taken in with what is seen

  In an explosion of sudden awareness of its formal splendor.

  The eyesight, seen as inner,

  Registers over the impact of itself

  Receiving phenomena, and in so doing

  Draws an outline, or a blueprint,

  Of what was just there: dead on the line.

  If it has the form of a blanket, that is because

  We are eager, all the same, to be wound in it:

  This must be the good of not experiencing it.

  But in some other life, which the blanket depicts anyway,

  The citizens hold sweet commerce with one another

  And pinch the fruit unpestered, as they will,

  As words go crying after themselves, leaving the dream

  Upended in a puddle somewhere

  As though “dead” were just another adjective.

  The Preludes

  The difficulty with that is

  I no longer have any metaphysical reasons

  For doing the things I do.

  Night formulates, the rest is up to the scribes and the eunuchs.

  The reasons though were not all that far away,

  In the ultramarine well under the horizon,

  And they were—why not admit it?—real,

  If not all that urgent.

  And night too was real. You could step up

  Into the little balloon carriage and be conducted

  To the core of bland festival light.

  And you mustn’t forget you can sleep there.

  Over near somewhere else there is the problem

  Of the difficulty. They weave together like dancers

  And no one knows anything about the problem any more

  Only the problem, like the outline

  Of a housewife closing her door in the face of a traveling salesman

  Throbs on the air for some time after.

  Perhaps for a long time after that.

  O we are all ushered in—

  Into the presence that explains.

  A Box and Its Contents

  Even better than summer, but I no longer

  Aim a poem at you, center of the forest at night,

  One shoe off and one shoe on, half-nubile, old.

  The excited ashes of your tale, always telling, more telling

  Until the day we get it right,

  A day of thoughtful joy. You said if it’s all right

  To do it then there will be animals sleeping under the trees anyway.

  You come out of love. But are. The treasure they

  Were firing at was always yours anyway, you meant

  To stand for it. Now there is no way down. But we

  Children of that particular time, we always get back down.

  You see, only some of the others were crying

  And how your broad smile paints in the wilderness

  A scene of happiness, with balloons and cars.

  It was always yours to dig into, and you can’t, loving us.

  The Cathedral Is

  Slated for demolition.

  I Had Thought Things Were Going Along Well

  But I was mistaken.

  Out Over the Bay the Rattle of Firecrackers

  And in the adjacent waters, calm.

  We Were on the Terrace Drinking Gin and Tonics

  When the squall hit.

  Fallen Tree

  We do not have it, and they

  Who have it are plunged in confusion:

  It is so easy not to have it, the gold coin, we know

  The contour of having it, a pocket

  Around space that is an endless library

  Where each book follows in a divinely ordered procession,

  Like the rays of the sun.

  Yet it was the pageant that you never wanted

  But which you need now to make sense of the strengthening

  Of the mounting days that begin to form a vault

  Above this ancient red stage.

  The days proceed.

  Each is good in his role,

  Very clever, in fact. But it is up to you

  To make sense of what each has done.

  Otherwise, in the rain-washed fiasco—

  Twilight? A coming triumph? Or some other

  Diversion you haven’t yet learned to recognize?—

  We shall never recognize our true reflections,

  Speaking to them as strangers, scolding,

  Asking the time of day.

  And the love that has happened for us

  Will not know us

  Unless you climb to a median kingdom

  Of no climate

  Where day and night exist only for themselves

  And the future is our table and chairs.

  The Picnic Grounds

  Let the music tell it:

  It came here, was around for a little while,

  And left, like the campers,

  Leaving fire-blackened brick, wrappers of things

  And especially monster mood
and emptiness

  Of those who were here and are gone.

  A complex, but optional, experience.

  Will the landscape mean anything new now?

  But even if it doesn’t, the charge

  Is up ahead somewhere, in the near future,

  Squashing even the allegory of the grass

  Into the mould of its aura, a lush patina.

  So we, with all our high-minded notions

  Of the self and the eventually winged purpose

  Of that self, are now meaning

  The raw material of the days and the ways that came over.

  The shadow has been indefinitely postponed.

  And the shape it takes in the process

  Of definition of the evolving

  Delta of shapes is too far, far in the milky limpid

  Future of things. Too far to care, yet

  There are those who do care for that

  Kind of outline, distant, yes, but warm,

  Full of the traceable meaning that never

  Gets adopted. Well, isn’t that truth?

  A Sparkler

  The simple things I notice:

  That they were coming at us, were at us, and were us

  In this night like rotten mayonnaise I am afraid of

  (It is helping me out) and steady boys

  I want no one to latch onto

  This time it has a special snap

  And how it curved outward that time was more elaborate

  But in the end got fuzzier

  And at the same time more deducible

  An illuminated word entered its crucible

  But just once come back see it the way

  I now see it

  Sit fooling with your hair

  Looking at me out of the corner of your eye

  I’m so sorry

  For what we haven’t done in the time we’ve known each other.

  Then it’s back to school

  Again yes the sales are on.

  What do you need? We’ll try ...

  Or is it all just a symbol of bad taste,

  Of a bad taste in the mouth? I tried,

  Not hard but pretty regular. But the pitch was

  Elsewhere, parallel. The habitués would have

  Had it, entertained it anyway,

  But I was in disgrace. I lived in disgrace.

  I was no one on that lawn.

  But, lasting by lasting,

  And by no other moment, we have come down

  At last to where the plumbing is.

  We had hoped for a dialogue.

  But they’re rusty.

  Then is it too late for me?

  The wide angle that seeks to contain

  Everything, as a sea, is an eye.

  What is beheld is whatever lives,

  Is wildly unappetizing and inappropriate,

  And sits, and fits us.

  The Wine

  It keeps a large supply of personal pronouns

  On hand. They awaken to see

  Themselves being used as it grows up,

  Confused, in a rush of fluidity.

  Once men came back here to rot.

  Now the salt banners only interrupt the sky—

  Black crystals, quartzite. The balm of not

  Knowing living filters to the bottom of each eye.

  The telephone was involved in it. And bored

  Glances, boring questions about the hem no

  One wanted to look at, or would admit having seen.

  These things came after it was a place to go.

  Yet nothing was its essence. The core

  Remained as elusive as ever. Until the day you

  Fitted the unlikely halves together, and they clicked.

  So its wholeness was an order. But it had seemed not to

  Be part of the original blueprint, the way

  It had appeared in intermittent dreams, stretching

  Over several nights, like that. But that was okay,

  Providing the noise factor didn’t suddenly loom

  Too large, as was precisely happening just now.

  Where have I seen that face before? And I see

  Just what it means to itself, and how it came

  Down to me. And so, in like manner, it came to be.

  A Love Poem

  And they have to get it right. We just need

  A little happiness, and when the clever things

  Are taken up (O has the mouth shaped that letter?

  What do we have bearing down on it?) as the last thin curve

  (“Positively the last,” they say) before the dark:

  (The sky is pure and faint, the pavement still wet) and

  The dripping is in the walls, within sleep

  Itself. I mean there is no escape

  From me, from it. The night is itself sleep

  And what goes on in it, the naming of the wind,

  Our notes to each other, always repeated, always the same.

  There’s No Difference

  In pendent tomes the unalterable recipe

  Is decoded. Then, a space,

  And another space. I was consulting

  The surface of the wand

  While you in white painter’s pants adored

  A sunflower, hoping it would shit across the nation.

  The explosion taught us to read again.

  Do not remember why everything is unsavory

  That in the night a pineapple came

  For this poster is nominally a conjecture.

  Distant Relatives

  Six o’clock. The fast fragrance

  Is clawing past me, frantic to be let out,

  Not competent to stand trial.

  Like trees on a golf course

  These hours propose themselves, one by one,

  And each comes to terms with roundness.

  The bobbed heads bob. The silence

  For once is melony, sweet as the light

  Off parked cars.

  I don’t need one of the hand-held jobs,

  A heavy machine will do. And I must put across

  Right now my idea of what it will do for me, before

  It too founders in the tolling of leaves

  (If all the tongues of all the bells

  In this city fluttered silently)

  As in that movie we saw where Mouloudji ...

  What will he do with it?

  1. I don’t get it.

  2. It may not be worth it.

  However the distances, it so happens, come to seem

  Like partitions, both near and far:

  Near, starting where my shoe is, and far

  Ahead in the perspective, but connected

  As the hours are connected to minutes

  And I still feel the absence of you

  As a thing that is both negative and positive

  Like the broken mould of a lost

  Statue

  As the din becomes an uproar.

  Histoire Universelle

  As though founded by some weird religious sect

  It is a paper disk, partially lit up from behind

  With testaments to its cragginess, many of them

  Illegible, covering most of its surface. In the hours

  Between midnight and 4 A.M. it assumes a fitful

  But calm sedentary existence, and it is then that

  You may reach in and take out a name, any name,

  And it will be your own, at least while

  The walls of Bill’s villa resonate with the intermittent,

  Migraine-like drone of motorized gondolas and the distant

  Murmur of cats. To be treated, at times like these,

  To free speech is an aspect of the dream and of Dreamland

  In general that asserts an even larger

  View of the universe pinned on the midnight-blue

  Backcloth of the universe that can’t understand

  Who all these people are, and about what

  So much fuss
is being made: it ignores its own entrails

  And we love it even more for it until we too

  Are parted like curtains across the empty stage of its memory.

  The house was for living in,

  So much was sure. But when the ways split

  And we saw out over what was after all

  Water and dawn, and prayed to the rocks

  Overhead, and no answer was forthcoming,

  It was then that the cosmic relaxer released us.

  We were together on such a day. You, oddly

  But becomingly dressed, pointed out that that

  Day is today, the moral. All that.

  Hittite Lullaby

  This time for you

  The hair-blackened beans

  And next semester the shouting

  In carpeted corridors

  More letters from the Sphinx

  About what it was like

  I greet you. I call to you

  To release me from the contract

  Morning flaps like a garment

  Over a corner of the city

  In mistrust with tears streaming

  I can see clearly to know precisely

  What is meant. My tact merely

  A delaying stratagem

  Is all I have. The sunlight

  On your broad feet today

  Withheld smiling.

  Why did we board the ocean liner

  Of lust signals out into the fog

  Knowing there were excursions

  But not this big one? My dog

  Has died, I think. I come on you

  All aspirations in the teeth

  Of some pedantic ritual.

  You take me where we were born.

  In a Boat

  Even when confronted by the small breakwater

  That juts out from the pebbled shore of truth

  You arch your eyebrows toward the daytime stars

  And remind me, “This is how I was. This was the last

  Part of me you were to know.” And I can see the lot

  Ending in the wood of general indifference to hostility

  That wants to know how with two such people around

  So much is finishing, so much rushing through the present.

  There was a tag on the little sailboat

  That idled there, all its sails rolled up