Chinese Whispers: Poems

by John Ashbery

  after which we could all go back to channeling the news.

  There’s a story here about a kind of grass that grows in the Amazon

  valley that is too tall for birds to fly over—

  they fly past it instead—

  yet leeches have no trouble navigating its circuitous heaps

  and are wont to throw celebratory banquets afterward,

  at which awards are given out—best costume in a period piece

  too distracted by the rapids to notice what period it is, and so on.

  Before retiring the general liked to play a game of all-white dominoes,

  after which he would place his nightcap distractedly on the other man’s crocheted chamber-pot lid.

  Subsiding into fitful slumber, warily he dreams

  of the giant hand descended from heaven

  like the slope of a moraine, whose fingers were bedizened with rings

  in which every event that had ever happened in the universe could sometimes be discerned.

  Sometimes you end up in a slough no matter what happens,

  no matter how many precautions have been taken, threads picked from the tapestry

  that was to have provided us with underwear, and now is bare as any

  grassless season, on whatever coast you choose to engage.

  It’s sad that many were left behind,

  but a good thing for the bluebirds in their beige houses.

  They never saw any reason to join the vast, confused migration,

  fucking like minks as far as the spotty horizon.

  It doesn’t get desperately cold any more, and that’s certainly a lucky anomaly too.

  I ASKED MR. DITHERS WHETHER IT WAS TIME YET HE SAID NO TO WAIT

  Time, you old miscreant! Slain any brontosauruses lately? You—

  Sixty wondering days I watched him navigate the alkali lick,

  always a little power ebbing, streaming from high windowsills.

  Down here the tetched are lonely. There’s nothing they can do

  except spit.

  We felt better about answering the business letter

  once the resulting hubris had been grandfathered in,

  slowly, by a withered sage in clogs

  and a poncho vast as a delta, made of some rubbery satinlike

  material. It was New Year’s Eve

  again. Time to get out the punch bowl,

  make some resolutions,

  I don’t think.

  HAVEN’T HEARD ANYTHING

  Quietly the first hours left, amused.

  We were in a quandary at first then wet our whistles

  in some neighborhood bar. The throng came on strong.

  It’s too far off to hear the people over there,

  someone said. Perhaps we should move,

  another one said. Perhaps. But we were way off

  and the rut in the sand only led to one place.

  When the sand closes over our ease

  we’ll know it done.

  The morose driver wept, represented his case

  as somehow more urgent. Than other passengers’.

  Some of them we got out.

  Vanilla ice cream, I quaffed,

  for it seemed good, for a little time at that.

  The poet wanted to introduce us to his suite.

  But what he really wanted to do

  was play for a little time. Well, that’s natural—

  I mean, who among us hasn’t tried?

  Few, it’s true, have succeeded.

  Another morn he would lie in shock

  over the state of poetry. “None could penetrate

  the recesses of the human mind like Major Pendennis,”

  he opined. We saw it coming,

  or should have:

  a big empty cape

  on the shoulders of the oldest,

  who seemed to be advancing.

  He wasn’t ancient, but he struck us that way.

  If we’d never been to town, and heard the lights

  sometime, we’d be all over a neighbor, licking,

  passing out free samples of dude. But it was like

  too cagey for them, none of us wanted to retire.

  Since that day the memory of recognition beats

  at my template. I don’t know what to do with all my acquired knowledge.

  I could give it to someone, I suppose. Wait, no then

  they wouldn’t know what to do with it.

  I suppose I could be relaxed.

  Yes, that’s more the ticket we smiled.

  CHINESE WHISPERS

  And in a Little while we broke under the strain:

  Suppurations ad nauseam, the wanting to be taller,

  though it’s simply about being mysterious, i.e., not taller,

  like any tree in any forest.

  Mute, the pancake describes you.

  It had tiny Roman numerals embedded in its rim.

  It was a pancake clock. They had ’em in those days,

  always getting smaller, which is why they finally became extinct.

  It was a hundred years before anyone noticed.

  The governor-general

  called it “sinuous.” But we, we had other names for it,

  knew it was going to be around for a long time,

  even though extinct. And sure as shillelaghs fall from trees

  onto frozen doorsteps, it came round again

  when all memory of it had been expunged

  from the common brain.

  Everybody wants to try one of those new pancake clocks.

  A boyfriend in the next town had one

  but conveniently forgot to bring it over each time we invited him.

  Finally the rumors grew more fabulous than the real thing:

  I hear they are encrusted with tangles of briar rose,

  so dense

  not even a prince seeking the Sleeping Beauty could get inside.

  What’s more, there are more of them than when they were extinct,

  yet the prices keep on rising. They have them in the Hesperides

  and in shantytowns on the edge of the known world,

  blue with cold. All downtowns used to feature them.

  Camera obscuras,

  too, were big that year. But why is it that with so many people

  who want to know what a shout is about, nobody can find the original recipe?

  All too soon, no one cares. We go back to doing little things for each other,

  pasting stamps together to form a tiny train track, and other,

  less noticeable things. The past is forgotten till next time.

  How to describe the years? Some were like blocks of the palest halvah,

  careless of being touched. Some took each other’s trash out,

  put each other’s eyes out. So many got thrown out

  before anyone noticed, it was like a chiaroscuro

  of collapsing clouds.

  How I longed to visit you again in that old house! But you were deaf,

  or dead. Our letters crossed. A motorboat was ferrying me out past

  the reef, people on shore looked like dolls fingering stuffs.

  More

  keeps coming out about the dogs. Surely a simple embrace

  from an itinerant fish would have been spurned at certain periods. Not now.

  There’s a famine of years in the land, the women are beautiful,

  but prematurely old and worn. It doesn’t get better. Rocks half-buried

  in bands of sand, and spontaneous execrations.

  I yell to the ship’s front door,

  wanting to be taller, and somewhere in the middle all this gets lost.

  I was a phantom for a day. My friends carried me around with them.

  It always turns out that much is salvageable.

  Chicken coops

  haven’t floated away on the flood. Lacemakers are back in business

  with a vengeance. All the locksmiths had left town durin
g the night.

  It happened to be a beautiful time of season, spring or fall,

  the air was digestible, the fish tied in love knots

  on their gurneys. Yes, and journeys

  were palpable too: Someone had spoken of saving appearances

  and the walls were just a little too blue in mid-morning.

  Was there ever such a time? I’d like to handle you,

  bruise you with kisses for it, yet something always stops me short:

  the knowledge that this isn’t history,

  no matter how many

  times we keep mistaking it for the present, that headlines

  trumpet each day. But behind the unsightly school building, now a pickle

  warehouse, the true nature of things is known, is not overridden:

  Yours is a vote like any other. And there is fraud at the ballot boxes,

  stuffed with lace valentines and fortunes from automatic scales,

  dispensed with a lofty kind of charity, as though this could matter

  to us, these tunes

  carried by the wind

  from a barrel organ several leagues away. No, this is not the time

  to reveal your deception to us. Wait till rain and old age

  have softened us up a little more.

  Then we’ll see how extinct

  the various races have become, how the years stand up

  to their descriptions, no matter how misleading,

  and how long the disbanded armies stay around. I must congratulate you

  on your detective work, for I am a connoisseur

  of close embroidery, though I don’t have a diploma to show for it.

  The trees, the barren trees, have been described more than once.

  Always they are taller, it seems, and the river passes them

  without noticing. We, too, are taller,

  our ceilings higher, our walls more tinctured

  with telling frescoes, our dooryards both airier and vaguer,

  according as time passes and weaves its minute deceptions in and out,

  a secret thread.

  Peace is a full stop.

  And though we had some chance of slipping past the blockade,

  now only time will consent to have anything to do with us,

  for what purposes we do not know.

  IN THE TIME OF PUSSY WILLOWS

  This is going to take some time.

  Nope, it’s almost over. For today anyway.

  We’ll have a beautiful story, old story

  to fish for as his gasps come undone.

  I never dreamed the pond of chagrin

  would affect me this much. Look, I’m shaking,

  shrinking with the devil

  in the stagy sunrise he devised.

  Then there will be no letters for what is truth,

  to make up the words of it. It will be standing still

  for all it’s worth. A hireling shepherd came along,

  whistling, his eyes on the trees. He was a servant of two masters,

  which is some excuse, although not really all that much of a one.

  Anyway, he overstayed his welcome. The last train had already left.

  How does one conduct one’s life amid such circumstances,

  dear snake, who want the best for us

  as long as you’re not hurt by it?

  My goodness, I thought I’d seen a whole lot of generations,

  but they are endless, one keeps following another,

  treading on its train, hissing.

  What a beautiful old story it could be after all

  if those in the back rows would stop giggling for a minute.

  By day, we paddled and arbitraged

  to get to this spot. By night it hardly matters.

  Strange we didn’t anticipate this,

  but the dumbest clues get overlooked by the smartest gumshoe

  and we’re back in some fetishist’s vinyl paradise

  with no clue as to how we got here

  except the tiny diamond on your pillow—it must have been a tear

  hatched from a dream, when you actually knew what you were doing.

  Now, it’s all fear. Fear and wrongdoing.

  Our outboard motor sputters and quits, and silence

  beats down from every point in the sky. To have digested this

  when we were younger, and felt a set of balls coming on ...

  It may be that thunder and lightning are two-dimensional,

  that there was never really any place for fear,

  that others get trapped, same as us, and make up

  amusing stories to cover their tracks. Wait,

  there’s one in the donjon wants to speak his piece. Rats,

  now he’s gone too.

  Yes, he slipped and died in front of you,

  and you intend to twist this into an ethos?

  Go make up other stories.

  Window reflected in the bubble,

  how often I’ve tried to pray to you,

  but your sphere would have nothing of it.

  I felt almost jinxed. Then a spider led the way

  back into the room

  and I knew why we’d never left. Outside was brushfires.

  Here was the peace of Philemon and Baucis,

  offering chunks of bread and salami to the tattered stranger,

  and a beaker of wine darker than the deepest twilight,

  a table spread with singularities

  for the desperate and tragic among us.

  Angel, come back please. Let us smell your heavenly smell again.

  THE AMERICAN

  It’s dull, no realism. A no-color. To what

  formlessness have we committed? How fond I am

  of it blew off the pensive boarder

  hunkered amid lilacs, a hoverer, as meat loves salt.

  Such scenes are not uncommon in this

  world of decent gin, this midden whose ungodly

  stench plunders all inserts of a keepable diary.

  Why call them stones?

  Swapping and cheating are as a labor of love

  for all concerned. I try to read some sense

  into the minutes but am usually rebuffed,

  as scorched linen yells at the ironing board’s

  grace note of intrigue. Sooner or later

  we send them packing, and they leave us—it’s

  so simple? Don’t you love it? Ask later whether

  we and they were loved. Someone should know. In 150, 160 years

  they’ll be beholden, you can bet. And not knowing what

  those others want has all along been a jiffy.

  The shelf’s canceled

  from the Adriatic to the Antarctic, my footsteps cast

  incredibly long shadows, though that’s not for you to macerate.

  Or masticate. I who matriculated was perhaps

  meant to be a lover unto you

  through the unabated storm’s portholes—dear, we’re

  here because he asked us to wait some more.

  THE SEVENTIES

  For a long time things seemed to go astutely.

  Every evening at four the unspooling showed us

  its friendly face. “I will treat you well,

  on my honor.” In those days, no one kept records

  or took notice of things much. It was

  possible to live as an entity.

  Still, surprising things were overheard

  from time to time. Voices that seemed to come from a garage

  with a third option no one had been told about.

  Something about a shipwreck. It was probably OK.

  We began to grow impatient

  about peace and war, after a busy day of relaxation

  few around us could contain or apprehend.

  The money fish had been strapped to my thigh.

  Otherwise I might have turned informant, living out my days

  in a Tudor bungalow under the wi
tness protection program.

  I needed the cash. The rest was just net profit and loss.

  ALL THAT NOW

  How old? The fish and the lake

  swam around together, easily bored.

  The belly of a courtier leans forth.

  It is mild weather. Just so much we know.

  So much we know and cannot have it

  in our little hands. The mouse goes to bed.

  A neighbor is placing his false teeth

  in a glass of water. You say, not like this,

  like this, but too much wells up—

  the patient outline of the maples’ faces,

  the brook that ran too far,

  into some intelligence or other.

  Amber and vanilla are all what we know,

  how can it be so? Whose little tootsie

  are you, once? Did the elephant

  walk silently past your house, one

  night when you were out?

  None of the children escapes—

  dam, waterfall, how could we hear

  it in the crashing noise? Whose complaint

  goes unregistered? How many of us are there,

  anyway? Or were, some, some of the time.

  Mayhap in dreams

  a lady kisses a far shuttle,

  warning away visions of Kansas

  and outer suburbia, where cows work.

  You came back from that dung

  as from another world,

  one that made you and broke you

  four times in the course of your life.

  Yet, you were “splendid.”

  You have answered every question.

  TRUTH GLEAMS

  “I threw a hairnet over the dry cleaner’s embroidery. It wasn’t long before something shot out of the rain pipe, between my ankles. An animus avoided me. The surface was fractured. Why do you come here, old man? Leave your nosegay of nettles on the altar in the side street. We don’t want too much of any one thing today. But you and your dog can stay.”

  “Nor will I know what to eat, when she rounds the curve of bananas. The altar offered little but idle chitchat. How far you’ve come if it’s autumn, and the plagues will surround you nervously, waiting for an opening. It could be anything, or just about anything, it seems. I am nervous with waiting in this alley of darkened peanut vendors. Mayhap some will come to inquire about me. After all, I was on your board of regents, too, when I was young. Maybe this may not be made to count. I offer you affection, distilled from the worldly tisanes of the stranger who stalked us here, once, offering insurance.”