Chinese Whispers: Poems

by John Ashbery

  “I can go no further. In the dark is drama and I am the better for it, though I have skimmed ... When the Bakerloo line takes over there will be loud crumpling as of wrapping paper, and those hens won’t know us, will become effective barring Saturday night. If only sandpaper were all ...”

  “Listen, I have a riddle for you. What swings and stands in place? Now you are not to answer if you know, leaving the sacrificial stone for other, younger—my heavens! Can it be? We stayed up three nights, purposely depriving ourselves of sleep in the interests of a greater god-fiction. Now I seem to see these mules in the afterglow, coming down the side of the mountain, their saddlebags packed with sapphires from the monarch’s glen. Truly the cows have escaped, the cock has risen, paying respects to all that gleams regardless. And the nearest is best after all. Like a perfumed armpit, thoughts take root and break off, and it is not so much the absence of an almanac but the presence of modern history books that testifies to our sudden chagrin, bound in red and olive, their gold lettering sputtering through the tides. Marry, if it was me I’d tell them the truth just for once, to be off on it. And their sable sides yield nothing, no rebuke, not even a reflection, for once in a way.”

  “Aye but if it was you you’d do it differently.”

  “Aye and that I would, but folks’d know why it was me and why. The tentative chains that stimulate can’t make a young mother happy, her tears are too green for that, yet if sometime somebody could come up with an effective mooring, who knows how wide of us we’d end up? Like a shower of rosewater on a difficult day. Then we all come out to play in the garbage, and the sense of nothing is no more. Checkmate! I’ve baffled you, hasn’t it? Here, take this caramel, it’s little enough for what you and the sand are worth. And every day the tide shifts a little to the east, reconfiguring the shore. I could get what I want at last if I needed it.”

  “My shirt is off to you, I’ll bleed through three blizzards ere we come to a crossways not of my own pullulating, but that’s just how you got off and what it takes, stiff. No more mayflies for the convention. Meanwhile you can be sure someone’s watching, someone wants ever so much to join our stitchery be it cloven, yet it is glued to one side, they pass through unseeing, the tide’s out, the night too. Anybody wants some of these can take ’em. Babes who’ve seen too much, underscored by the petunia blight that crept over the last two decades of the century that recently ended, as far as the ‘I’ can see. Coffee?”

  LITTLE SICK POEM

  If living is a hate crime, so be it.

  But hey—I was around when they invented the Cardiff giant.

  I kid you not. God wanted you to know,

  so you’d remember to love Him. Yes, He often confides in me,

  tips me off to the whereabouts of valuable junk

  but doesn’t want me to let on we are in cahoots.

  This lamp, covered in rust, is valuable

  though not old. It is collectible,

  as we all are, in a sense. I love you,

  it’s sexual harassment, but we get on that way,

  through bluster, through dried open fields.

  If I were you I’d get an unlisted number,

  then think about growing up, just a little.

  I can’t tell you which divining bones to choose, that’s your job,

  and when you come close, I wish it was all around,

  around over me. The jingle of your hat comforts me,

  confirms me in my worst aspects. I shall never be anything but a clown,

  now. And there’s so much work to do,

  so many puzzles to ignore.

  A MAN CLAMORED

  That strike ended and another one began.

  None of them were long. One further loop.

  In the olive valleys they live

  the way we did a hundred years ago.

  Speculation stems from a fissure

  in the valley’s steep side.

  There is no room for bathing

  any more in that. She saw us

  make eye contact.

  The police, a few of them, are years old.

  It was a nice beginning for a story

  that might never end, so we chose a more careful

  one instead. It’s free fall in the trees now.

  Twilight is a firm maybe. The cobbler’s

  children wear shoes to school, even in the rain.

  Perhaps it’s time for them and us.

  You wore a yellow dress and selected earrings.

  LOCAL LEGEND

  Arriving late at the opera one night

  I ran into Dr. Gradus ad Parnassum hastening down the marble stair,

  swan-like. “I wouldn’t bother if I was you,” he confided.

  “It’s a Verdi work written before he was born.

  True, his version of the Faust legend is unique:

  Faust tempts Mephistopheles to come up with something

  besides the same old shit. Finally, at his wit’s end, the devil

  urges Valentine to take his place, promising him big rewards

  this side of Old Smoky. Then, wouldn’t you know, Gretchen gels involved.

  They decide to make it into a harassment case. No sooner

  does Faust hit the street than the breeze waffles his brow,

  he can’t say where he came from, or if he ever had a youth

  to be tempted back into.”

  The bats arrived. It was their moment.

  Twenty million bats fly out of an astonishingly low culvert

  every night, in season. I kid you not. After a cursory swoop

  or two, they all fly back in. It all happens in a matter of

  minutes, seconds, almost. Which reminds me, have you chosen your second?

  Mephisto wants you to use this foil. It works better.

  No, there’s nothing wrong with it.

  Hours later I stood with the good doctor

  in a snow-encrusted orchard. He urged the value

  of mustard plasters on me. “See, it makes sense.”

  Yet we both knew they are poisonous in some climates,

  though only if taken in minute quantities.

  See you again, old thing.

  MEET ME TONIGHT IN DREAMLAND

  It was an hour ago. I walked upstairs to dreamland. Took a cab and got out and somebody else backed in. Now we weren’t actually on the Dreamland floor. That would be for later. Look, these are the proper plans, plants. They used to have a Chautauqua here, far out into the lake. Now it’s peeled. No one actually comes here. Yet there are people. You just hardly ever see them. No I wasn’t being modest. Some get out on the floor, several a year, whose purple glass sheds an eldritch glow on the trottoirs, as Whitman called them. Or spittoons. Look, we are almost a half a mile later, it must link up. The Tennessee drifter smiled sharkly. Then it was on to native board games.

  Je bois trop.

  In one of these, called “Skunk,” you are a weasel chasing a leveret back to its hole when Bop! the mother weasel, about ten stories tall, traps you with her apron string, patterned with poppies and rotted docks. You see, you thought every noun had to have an adjective, even “sperm,” and that’s where you made your first big mistake. Later it’s raining and we have to take a car. But the game isn’t over—there are sixteen thousand marble steps coming up, down which you glide as effortlessly as you please, as though on a bicycle, weasel in tow. It’s an exercise bike. What a time to tell me, the solar wind has sandpapered everything as smooth as quartz. Now it’s back to the finish line with you.

  You’re not quite out of the woods yet. Dreamland has other pastures, other melodies to chew on. Hummingbirds mate with dragonflies beneath the broken dome of the air, and it’s three o’clock, the sun is raining mineral-colored candy. I’d like one of these. It’s yours. Now I’m glad we came. I hate drafts though and the sun is slowly moving away. I’m standing on the poop deck wiggling colored pennants at the coal-colored iceberg that seems to be curious about us, is sliding this way a
nd that, then turns abruptly back into the moors with their correct hills in the distance. If it was me I’d take a trip like this every day of my life.

  ORNERY FISH

  Wind your way to the floor,

  sweet. No passions obtain today.

  We are full of vinaigrette,

  cursed by the rain for being rained on.

  This pass has expired.

  I thought we had retreated

  until I noticed you far out in the field,

  waving a crimson handkerchief

  toward someone I couldn’t see.

  This is the way it goes: I

  come back, then you come back to me.

  Our heads blend in the twilight tea.

  Once, we thought it was over.

  A man claimed to be giving away

  all he had. Actually he kept much of it.

  Now, he can’t give it away,

  or get arrested in Utica. The violence

  of which I was so important a part

  is chiefly lilacs now—purple,

  speedy shelter. Toward you it climbs

  like a ladder in the wall

  of a besieged city. Trouble is, the city

  has already fallen, the starved inhabitants

  are welcoming us invaders with streamers;

  there is a pit where the golf course was

  but milk supplies are normal

  again. From the towers of the frescoed fun house

  the virgins are beseeching: let it all happen

  again, let this come over us,

  travel over us like a wave or time,

  from which protrudes a tiny fist

  clutching orange or yellow flowers.

  PORTRAIT WITH A GOAT

  We were reading to ourselves. Sometimes to others.

  I was quietly reading the margin

  when the doves fell, it was blue

  outside. Perhaps in a moment,

  he said. The moment never came.

  I was reading something else now,

  it didn’t matter. Other people came and

  dropped off their résumés. I wasn’t being idle,

  exactly. Someone wanted to go away

  altogether in this preposterous season.

  THE DECALS IN THE HALLWAY

  remanded Margery to an earlier contingency:

  Sir Isaac fishing for compliments

  in troubled waters, and like that. In a flash, a star

  o’erspread their terrestrial inhibitions. Mother’s

  hairnet came unknotted. She dabbled in bliss

  all her life, early knew perfection’s spiteful sting.

  He’d imbibed his father-in-law’s authority

  as though it were ichor. Sometimes, transplanted

  to the elephant’s-foot umbrella stand

  in the vestibule, he’d curse children and the impossible

  trail of conundrums they leave behind. It’d

  be just like him, she thought, to leave

  on the eve of the midnight of their secrecy,

  secretly planning to be around next morning

  when the gulls had drifted away and the engines given

  out.

  And sweet it was to contemplate the immediate

  future of immediacy. Iris and the little ones had run out onto the street,

  cries came from the corner, like dishes falling

  absentmindedly against each other.

  Another corker, she planned. Instead

  the call went out: Diversify! And in so doing

  casually assuage some of your dopiest penchants. Here,

  the anesthetized markets of the world await,

  prostrate, time’s scalpel’s hobson-jobson,

  while ninnies panic under the pancake tree, touting wired panaceas,

  spillovers of earlier attractions, tie-in deals

  with the Old One himself.

  Cool invitations now apply.

  Every faction would like to own its kind of behavior,

  though we weren’t being modern just then. Far from it:

  We were thinking money shots in Piazzola plazas

  of retching grief, where not one codicil reaches striplinghood

  unsieved. Yet the hole that encounters a crater

  knows which antidote to swallow. Lord Henry waded far out

  into the crabs’ private estuary, yet the water never grazed his knees.

  The sun-driven sky’s paisley was as good as perjured; as collateral

  it had probably peaked; yet who precisely are these camp followers,

  and what is it that they think we have done that they want to ask us about?

  As one protuberant pubescent I was tossed, over and over again in a blanket.

  Sometimes I think I live there still. Certain declivities interested me then,

  made me think about grad school, if only

  to get away from the archaic rumblings.

  I’d face an Everest of chilblains just to insinuate myself

  with the wolf, one more time. They told us he was out, not to wait.

  The joke was on them, they said.

  They’ll be back soon.

  ECHOLALIA RAG

  1.

  The garage door is unlocked. Your

  “tantalizing fragrance” roars over me

  like a word.

  What word?

  Well I wasn’t going to utter that,

  not today. It’s too late.

  For today, it’s late.

  We can take the train back tomorrow.

  There’s still time to catch the last one.

  The sun was still high in the heavens—

  2.

  My gawd all the chickens

  in whatever coop

  riding high,

  heading our way,

  another legend, palpably untrue, but which will be around for a long time.

  Human error caused a collision

  of houndstooth check and puffs

  of train smoke

  and apple blossoms.

  Here are blossoms for you—

  you know, “habitat,”

  and what to put into it

  now.

  3.

  When the gingerbread boy

  did his morose errand

  it was melting on the ground,

  felt tubing on the floor,

  like a good scare

  isn’t around anymore,

  like even you knew it

  coming on in your car, the sun,

  melted cheese over whiskey down:

  Don’t sneeze yet.

  THE EVENING OF GREUZE

  As a group we were somewhat vulnerable

  and are so today. My brother-in-law has fixed

  me a tower in the mill, from whose oriel

  I can see the bluebottles who nag heaven

  with their unimportance. But what are they expected to do?

  Raise families? Become deacons? If so my calculations

  collapse into bric-a-brac, my equations

  are undone.

  Across the road they are building a cement house.

  It will seemingly have no windows. A columbarium

  for cement pigeons. And ever as I talked to you

  down the decades in my letters one thing was unsure:

  your reply. Now we are again endangered,

  like dead birds, and autumn’s ruby spittle mounts

  in the sky like a tornado. Try to keep

  cold and empty in this bare room.

  Examine mirrors in the studio.

  The lizard’s glint, the horse’s velvet blanket

  will surprise you into veiled hope one day.

  AS UMBRELLAS FOLLOW RAIN

  Too bad he never tried it—

  he might have liked it.

  She saw us make eye contact.

  And that was that for that day.

  Too bad he too, when I

  am

  meaning if I came along it
’d

  already be too late.

  Some of the swans are swarming.

  The spring has gone under—it wasn’t

  supposed to be like this.

  Now they watch him and cringe.

  Who are they? Who is he?

  We decided to fly Chinese.

  The food wasn’t that good.

  And oh Erwin did I tell you

  that man—the one—I didn’t

  know if I was supposed to or not.

  He crawled back listlessly,

  holding a bunch of divas.

  It’s hard work getting these out,

  but so’s any thing you’re entitled to do:

  classes to attend.

  The morning of school.

  Evening almost over,

  they bend the security rules.

  It’s time for another fog bomb.

  Lookit the way they all roost.

  Poor souls clashed together

  until almost the root’s roof

  separates us from our beginning.

  We slew many giants in our day,

  burned many libraries.

  Roundabouts, swings,

  it was all one piece of luck to us.

  Now we’re washed up it’s almost cold.

  Not bad enough to put up a stand.