Chinese Whispers: Poems

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,