by John Ashbery
IN WHATEVER MODE
“Tenderly,” we thought. It estranged us a little.
A later kindness dissipates a sullen era’s
awning. In the end we are all bores.
That’s what it’s for.
I plant my feet on the path
and look down a certain way. Surely, all this is coming
to an end, but, just as surely,
we know ourselves as affable.
A fine furor provoked it, storm swimming
in the weather vane. Two looked out.
“It’s bait and switch time.” Only if you mean it,
mean, that is, other stars.
The book hadn’t been checked out all day.
“What are we to do for you ...” A stranger,
ein Fremdes, shouted. The wide avenue of lamentation.
Others than you I’ve swatted
when it was impersonal. Now, it’s you
I come back to. Out of love? The grown man whimpers.
Be careful with the vegetables, penises.
It was slowly she came down from the roof
to examine the withered nest in my hand, blunt thing.
I’d imagined you brutal, somewhat, under summer scarves.
Now the only way out is backward through the mess of cleaning.
Back to the back rows of the orchestra
where impatient silent citizens wait.
But it’s not for us to let them go. Offer them a pear;
see how crystal the ditch is beside the main waterway.
Someone is coming to brunch.
And we can just leave it outdoors
all winter. That way, no one will mind.
It’s the beauty of it, beauty of the fallen stone.
FROM THE DIARY OF A MOLE
Shoehorning in one’s own tribute to crustiness is another life-form for him. Something then went out of us. In the pagan dawn three polar bears stand in the volumetric sky’s grapeade revelation.
“Time to go to the thoughtful house.”
They may not get you here, they may not get you there, they may not get you everywhere, but they will get you somewhere. Yet the proposition never came to a vote, was not voted on. You see the realism in it? No, of course you don’t, for something else is still there, something to replace all of it in one block. Anent the spillway: His crimes are gorgeous but don’t matter just now. Later
we will call him on them. When it subsides. That is, everything.
Just a teardrop of milk, thanks. Don’t believe that rag. It inferred we were adolescents, once, that sex roared over us like a mudslide, leaving us. We were lost. So lost, in fact, that his mother didn’t know me till I came out toward her, and she knew me and was not afraid, was glad in fact, for the rainbow late in the day in its foam of cloud, poised above the basin. Then I had a preshrunk sweater sent to him and asked if there was anything else. “Nothing, a fresh breeze.” Still, leaves are asleep. The bears act as if no one’s there. She curls up in the curlew’s nest, weeping on its golden eggs. It took the savagery of centuries of animal conflict to bring us just short of this, and you, why have you done? Oh, I
don’t much matter I guess. If that’s all I’ll be on my way. To the box in which savage handwriting is hidden, too dense for you to decipher, too lorn for a world to unravel just now, but like they say I’ll be suing you. So really it’s fine until Christmas I can stand it, a runt, I’ll just go on blooming in my box, unaware of things sleeping pagans say about us, glad to crash, collapse the silk hat, garden’s done and I’m all in and breathless for a breather. Come right in. What world is this.
TOO MUCH SLEEP IS BAD
I don’t have a chronic cough.
Cats don’t drool over me.
You can’t listen to the change that’s being monitored.
You can only participate in your life—
mutatis mutandis—
and they finally get it wrong.
THE BIG IDEA
Don’t hit the bull’s-eye.
The long winter festers,
day after unguarded day.
People are “shoveling out,”
night a monotony of stars and
other instances.
The Big Idea
flourished for a while, then flagged
short of the summit.
The people’s republics
went under like failing bakeries.
Always, in the shadows at the edge,
there was time to say this. And something.
Half past ten and the village
is out of order, shot through
with delirium tremens.
Tomorrow we shall arrive here
wondering what all the fuss was about.
Gawkers perpetuate the misquoted line.
One is all fingertips, one feels something
like at the border, a nowhere shine.
WHY NOT SNEEZE?
Oh dark days and punctual,
always backing into our alley,
feigning surprise for the umpteenth time:
Why don’t you just go away?
Leave us to the land that binds
us and itself to present methods.
Leave the golf course simmering in light that has steeped
too long. It’s the same with us, dull
on certain days.
Wake up, you’re looking at this magazine.
A SWEET PLACE
How happy are the girls on the cocoa tin,
as though there could be nothing in the world but chocolate!
As though to confirm this, a wall stood nearby,
displaying gold medals from various expositions—
Groningen 1893, Anvers 1887—whose judges had had the good sense
to reward the noble chocolatiers. All love’s bright-bad sweetness
gleams in those glorious pastilles.
But the empathy valve’s
shut by someone—a fibrous mist
invades their stubborn cheeks and flaxen hair.
Time for the next audition.
Who to watch? What new celeb’s dithering
is this, commemorated in blazing script?
The torches are extinguished in marl.
I will live in a house in the middle of the road,
it says here. No shit!
What did I do to deserve this? Who controls
this anger management seminar? They’ve had their way with me;
I am as I was before. Thank heaven! If I could but remember
how that was. Always, it’s nightfall
in a wood, some paths are descended,
and looking out over the ropy landscape, one sees
a necessity that was at the beginning.
Further up there is fog. But it’s nice being standing:
We should be home soon,
dearest, a dry hearth awaits us, and the indulgence of sleep.
What if I really was a drifter,
would you still like me? Would you vote
for me in the straw polls of November, wait for me
in the anteroom of December, embrace the turbulent, glittering skies
the New Year brings? Lie down with me once and for all?
The radio is silent, fretful; it bides its time
and the world forgets to consider. There is room to tabulate
the wonders of its sesquicentennials,
but the aftermath’s unremarkable, picked
clean by a snarky wind.
Then I became as one who followed.
VIEW OF DELFT
The afternoon is slow, slower and slower
until a full stop is reached
long before anyone realized it.
Only the faintest nip in the air
causes these burghers to become aware
that their time is passing too, and then but fitfully.
Go stack those bricks over there.
See what the horse is doing.
Ev
erything around you is waiting.
It is now apologized for.
The sky puts a finger to its lips.
The most optimistic projections confirm
the leakage theory. Another drop in temperature
is anticipated. It’s all about standing still,
isn’t it? That and remaining in touch with
a loose-fitting impression of oneself:
oneself at fifteen, out at night
or at a party in the daytime.
Oh sure, I knew it was me all along.
Then the sneezes got up to go.
POSTILION OF AUTUMN
A shower or two, and the old landscape
is good as new. A bit yellow in spots,
but that’s what’s called progress.
She hovers, lonesomely, like a zeppelin, over downcast
vales and trees, a free spirit, or something
like that.
We’d reached the end of the grove,
it was time to turn back, to find what we’d left behind
waiting for us. And it was good to see the scraps
of pleasure assembling into a face. By and large conduits
of reduced gauge carry the fiber optics better,
the chatting, the suspense, lorries of debris
haunted by the sometime catchall of these cisterns. It was quite
cozy in the Midwest, he’d wanted to say, but never
understood how a question can just go out
like a pilot light, leaving the need rubbed and raw
in hankered-after faces.
THIS DEUCED CLEVERNESS
is what’s the matter. Can’t see without it.
Or was it, over the years of arrears,
swathed in a hoydenish privacy? No.
It’s ours to deal.
The true crisis is only now coming to rest.
Birdie, on your tree,
I like you. Can’t we be friends? Why is this awful
oxygen all that concerns us?
Seriously, I’d like you to come down.
On wings of windows, parties, songs,
comedy and mystery, the world drenches us.
It’s the same world as before. Only time has exploded.
We mustn’t draw many conclusions from that, only
keep our distance, as though the years mattered
to our education. We like us as we were before.
That’s all right, no argument there,
no benediction either.
The month looks just as unsightly as before.
So who trained me to bring it inside,
pat it, make a fuss over it,
prepare its little dinner? It’s not even ominous.
An ombudsman explained the nexus wasn’t ours
to roost in, that we’d all be moving back in someday.
He laid it on the line and went home.
Said he needed a breather. The next day he was back
with a sheet of instructions. The neighbor dissented,
said it was all poppycock. There’d be no collective bargaining
without his input. As I’d noticed
on similar occasions, he left his cap in the hall.
Asked why he did so, the tout turned surly,
then stringently polite. It’s your agreement,
he explained, you don’t even have to sign it;
then took up the discussion at a farther juncture,
spoke in general terms
only vaguely related to the present situation.
Claimed it smacked of pettifoggery
and worse. But there would be peace along the way,
eventually—
If we shadows have offended
we’ll replace the argument with the veil, again.
There can’t be too many soft corners to lurch into.
The rooms have been spared the mindless tracking in
of guests. The carpets are fresh as moonlight,
I think, as in those ancient jalousie warehouses.
UNPOLISHED SEGMENT
Golden Fleece, where are you, Golden Fleece?
—Osip Mandelstam
The scribes are in agreement:
It would be a decade before the child is born
and two more before unhappiness
erects shyly into happiness
for a while till the suburban roadbed
is made over and grief laughs from oriels,
a billowing decline.
Roof down, it lay less urgent.
Panhandlers, virgins, tax collectors, the
self-medicating slime we were
overcame all that was
then. We said good night.
(Various pizzicati weighed in.)
I looked past the manger to the stuttering fields beyond:
Is it you who’ve come to take me to that place,
polish me,
in a world pressed into forgiving?
Then on four feet it turned,
as though having forgotten something,
came and presented it:
I said it was you all along.
I should have gotten up under the eaves, when thunders
yawned in the new day.
Perhaps I was too old, or not yet
old enough to undertake a new stage
of “life’s journey,” another episode.
But the sea gave repose.
He turned his face full to the leaves;
autumn caught him in the mouth,
slapped some worried sense into all of us.
The beginning of the middle is like that.
Looking back it was all valleys, shrines floating on the powdered hill,
ambivalence that came in a flood sometimes,
though warm, always, for the next tenant
to abide there.
MORDRED
Now I have neither back nor front.
I am the way certain persons are
who never tell you how they are
yet you know they are like you and they are.
I was preternaturally wise
but it was spring, there was no one to care or do.
It was spring and the sprinklers were on.
Bay, indentation, viscous rocks
that are somebody’s pleasure. Pleasures that don’t go away
but don’t exactly stay,
stay the way they were meant to be.
I caught a winged one,
looked it firmly in the eyes:
What is your surmise? Oh, I only like living on,
the rest isn’t so important to me,
not at all, if you wish.
But I do, I said. Then, well, it’s like a clearing
in the darkness that you can’t see. Darkness is meant for all of us.
We grow used to it. Then daylight comes again.
That’s what I mean when I say about living
it could be going on, going somewhere else,
but it’s not, it’s here, more or less.
You have to champion it, then it fights for you,
but that isn’t necessary. It will go on living anyway.
I say do you mind I’m getting tired.
But there is one last thing I must know about you.
Do you remember a midnight forge
around which crept the ghosts of lepers, who were blacksmiths
in a time persistently unidentifiable, and then you went like this?
You remember how the hammer fell slowly
taking all that song with you.
You remember the music of the draft horses
they could only make against a wall.
All right, how little does it all cost you then?
You were a schoolchild, now you are past middle age,
and the great drawing hasn’t occurred.
I see I must be going.
I just like living,
only like living.
Sometime you must tell m
e of your intentions,
but now I have to stay here on this fast track
in case the provisions come along
which I won’t need, being a living, breathing creature.
But I asked you about your hat.
Oh yes well it is important to have a hat.
THE LIGHTNING CONDUCTOR
The general was always particular about his withers,
lived in a newspaper tent
someone had let fall beside an easy chair.
Telling the man with no fingers what it was like to smoke a cigarette
in the Twenties, we proceeded naturally to your cousin Junius.
His plan was to overtake the now speeding tortoise
by digging some kind of a fire trench in its path,
which would cause it to wonder,
fatally, for a second,