by John Ashbery
In the meantime there are so many things not to believe in
We can make a hobby of them, as long as we continue to uphold
The principle of private property.
So what if ours is planted with tin-can trees
It’s better than a forest full of parked cars with the lights out,
Because the effort of staying back to side with someone
For whom number is everything
Will finally unplug the dark
And the black acacias stand out as symbols, lovers
Of what men will at last stop doing to each other
When we can be quiet, and start counting sheep to stay awake together.
Never Seek to Tell Thy Love
Many colors will take you to themselves
But now I want someone to tell me how to get home.
The way back there is streaked and stippled,
A shaded place. It belongs where it is going
Not where it is. The flowers don’t talk to Ida now.
They speak only the language of flowers,
Saying things like, How hard I tried to get there.
It must mean I’m not here yet. But you,
You seem so formal, so serious. You can’t read poetry,
Not the way they taught us back in school.
Returning to the point was always the main thing, then.
Did we ever leave it? I don’t think so. It was our North Pole.
We skulked and hungered there for years, and now,
Like dazzled insects skimming the bright airs,
You are back on the road again, the path leading
Vigorously upward, through intelligent and clear spaces.
They don’t make rocks like us any more.
And holding on to the thread, fine as a cobweb, but incredibly strong,
Each of us advances into his own labyrinth.
The gift of invisibility
Has been granted to all but the gods, so we say such things,
Filling the road up with colors, faces,
Tender speeches, until they feed us to the truth.
Darlene’s Hospital
The hospital: it wasn’t her idea
That the colors should slide muddy from the brush
And spew their random evocations everywhere,
Provided that things should pick up next season.
It was a way of living, to her way of thinking.
She took a job, it wasn’t odd.
But then, backing through the way many minds had been made up,
It came again, the color, always a color
Climbing the apple of the sky, often
A secret lavender place you weren’t supposed to look into.
And then a sneeze would come along
Or soon we’d be too far out from shore, on a milky afternoon
Somewhere in late August with the paint flaking off,
The lines of traffic flowing like mucus.
And they won’t understand its importance, it’s too bad,
Not even when it’s too late.
Now we’re often happy. The dark car
Moves heftily away along low bluffs,
And if we don’t have our feelings, what
Good are we, but whose business is it?
Beware the happy man: once she perched light
In the reading space of my room, a present joy
For all time to come, whatever happens;
And still we rotate, gathering speed until
Nothing is there but more speed in the light ahead.
Such moments as we prized in life:
The promise of a new day, living with lots of people
All headed in more or less the same direction, the sound of this
In the embracing stillness, but not the brutality,
And lists of examples of lots of things, and shit—
What more could we conceivably be satisfied with, it is
Joy, and undaunted
She leaves the earth at that point,
Intersecting all our daydreams of breakfast and lunch.
The Lady of Shalott’s in hot water again.
This and the dreams of any of the young
Were not her care. The river flowed
Hard by the hospital from whose gilded
Balconies and turrets fair spirits waved,
Lonely, like us. Here be no pursuers,
Only imagined animals and cries
In the wilderness, which made it “the wilderness,”
And suddenly the lonesomeness becomes a pleasant city
Fanning out around a lake; you get to meet
Precisely the person who would have been here now,
A dream no longer, and are polished and directed
By his deliberate grasp, back
To the reality that was always there despairing
Of your return as months and years went by,
Now silent again forever, the perfect space,
Attuned to your wristwatch
As though time would never go away again.
His dirty mind
Produced it all, an oratorio based on love letters
About our sexual habits in the early 1950s.
It wasn’t that these stories weren’t true,
Only that a different kind of work
Of the imagination had grown up around them, taller
Than redwoods, and not
Wanting to embarrass them, effaced itself
To the extent that a colossus could, and so you looked
And saw nothing, but suddenly felt better
Without wondering why. And the serial continues:
Pain, expiation, delight, more pain,
A frieze that lengthens continually, in the happy way
Friezes do, and no plot is produced,
Nothing you could hang an identifying question on.
It’s an imitation of pleasure; it may not work
But at least we’ll know then that we’ll have done
What we could, and chalk it up to virtue
Or just plain laziness. And if she glides
Backwards through us, a finger hooked
Out of death, we shall not know where the mystery began:
Inaccurate dreamers of our state,
Sodden from sitting in the rain too long.
Destiny Waltz
Everyone has some work to be done
And after that they may have some fun.
Which sometimes leads to distraction.
Older faces than yours
Have been whirled away on heaven
Knows what wind like painted leaves in autumn.
Seriousness doesn’t help either:
Just when you get on it it slips its tether,
Laughing, runs happily away.
It is a question of forbearance among the days.
Ask, but not too often: that way most ways
Of leading up to the truth will approach you
Timidly at first, wanting to get to know you
Before wandering away on other paths
Leading out of your meanwhile safe precinct.
Your feet know what they’re doing.
And if later in the year some true fear,
A real demon comes to be installed
In the sang-froid of not doing anything,
The shoe is on the other foot
This time,
Just this one time.
Romance removes so much of this
Yet staying behind while it does so
Is no way to agitate
To break the year’s commotion where it loomed
Sharpest and most full. It’s a trance.
Try Me! I’m Different!
Obviously the guts and beauty are going to be denied again
This time around, as we all meet at twilight
In a level place surrounded by tall trees. It’s another kind of contest.
Whatever is sworn, promised, sea
led
With kisses, over and over, is as strange, faithless
And fundamentally unlike us as the ocean when it fills
Deep crevices far inland, more deeply involved with the land
Than anyone suspected. Such are our games,
And so also the way we thought of them
In the time behind the telling. Now it goes smoothly
Under glass. The contours and color contrasts are
Sharper, but there is no sound. And I didn’t deliberately
Try to hide my ambition, wearing the same tweed jacket
For the fourteenth season; instead I thought its pedigree something
To notice. But the question of style has been
Turned inside out in the towns where we never meet.
I lived so long without being scolded that I grew
To feel I was beyond criticism, until I flew
Those few paces from the nest. Now, I understand,
My privilege means giving up all claims on life
As the casual, criminal thing it sometimes is, in favor of
A horizon in whose cursive recesses we
May sometimes lie concealed because we are part
Of the pattern. No one misses you. The future
Ignores those streaming with a present so heavy
And intense we are subdued by the outline.
No one criticizes us for lacking depth,
But the scandal shimmers, around and elsewhere.
If we could finally pry open the gate to the pastures of the times,
No sickness would be evident. And the colors we adduced
Would supply us, parables ourselves, told in our own words.
One of the Most Extraordinary Things in Life
must never be invented. It shall have been.
Once its umbrella of truth is raised to become
And tall trees follow it as though it were Orpheus,
Its music, in trouble, slows down to a complete standstill,
Still in trouble but has become a cube
With all the outside faces reflecting
What we did before we got here. One of us,
A little poorer than the others, half-turns
To divulge a truth in low relief that another
Messenger would have been killed for: it isn’t
Our waiting that makes us worthy of having been here forever,
Only the wild groves you read about, that no one
Has probably ever seen. I hear they have caves
In which men as old as the earth live, that when
These die, nothing ever takes their place.
Therefore, why weep we, mourners, around
A common block of space?
Whatever It Is, Wherever You Are
The cross-hatching technique which allowed our ancestors to exchange certain genetic traits for others, in order to provide their offspring with a way of life at once more variegated and more secure than their own, has just about run out of steam and has left us wondering, once more, what there is about this plush solitude that makes us think we will ever get out, or even want to. The ebony hands of the clock always seem to mark the same hour. That is why it always seems the same, though it is of course changing constantly, subtly, as though fed by an underground stream. If only we could go out in back, as when we were kids, and smoke and fool around and just stay out of the way, for a little while. But that’s just it—don’t you see? We are “out in back.” No one has ever used the front door. We have always lived in this place without a name, without shame, a place for grownups to talk and laugh, having a good time. When we were children it seemed that adulthood would be like climbing a tree, that there would be a view from there, breathtaking because slightly more elusive. But now we can see only down, first down through the branches and further down the surprisingly steep grass patch that slopes away from the base of the tree. It certainly is a different view, but not the one we expected.
What did they want us to do? Stand around this way, monitoring every breath, checking each impulse for the return address, wondering constantly about evil until necessarily we fall into a state of torpor that is probably the worst sin of all? To what purpose did they cross-hatch so effectively, so that the luminous surface that was underneath is transformed into another, also luminous but so shifting and so alive with suggestiveness that it is like quicksand, to take a step there would be to fall through the fragile net of uncertainties into the bog of certainty, otherwise known as the Slough of Despond?
Probably they meant for us to enjoy the things they enjoyed, like late summer evenings, and hoped that we’d find others and thank them for providing us with the wherewithal to find and enjoy them. Singing the way they did, in the old time, we can sometimes see through the tissues and tracings the genetic process has laid down between us and them. The tendrils can suggest a hand, or a specific color—the yellow of the tulip, for instance—will flash for a moment in such a way that after it has been withdrawn we can be sure that there was no imagining, no auto-suggestion here, but at the same time it becomes as useless as all subtracted memories. It has brought certainty without heat or light. Yet still in the old time, in the faraway summer evenings, they must have had a word for this, or known that we would someday need one, and wished to help. Then it is that a kind of purring occurs, like the wind sneaking around the baseboards of a room: not the infamous “still, small voice” but an ancillary speech that is parallel to the slithering of our own doubt-fleshed imaginings, a visible soundtrack of the way we sound as we move from encouragement to despair to exasperation and back again, with a gesture sometimes that is like an aborted movement outward toward some cape or promontory from which the view would extend in two directions—backward and forward—but that is only a polite hope in the same vein as all the others, crumpled and put away, and almost not to be distinguished from any of them, except that it knows we know, and in the context of not knowing is a fluidity that flashes like silver, that seems to say a film has been exposed and an image will, most certainly will, not like the last time, come to consider itself within the frame.
It must be an old photograph of you, out in the yard, looking almost afraid in the crisp, raking light that afternoons in the city held in those days, unappeased, not accepting anything from anybody. So what else is new? I’ll tell you what is: you are accepting this now from the invisible, unknown sender, and the light that was intended, you thought, only to rake or glance is now directed full in your face, as it in fact always was, but you were squinting so hard, fearful of accepting it, that you didn’t know this. Whether it warms or burns is another matter, which we will not go into here. The point is that you are accepting it and holding on to it, like love from someone you always thought you couldn’t stand, and whom you now recognize as a brother, an equal. Someone whose face is the same as yours in the photograph but who is someone else, all of whose thoughts and feelings are directed at you, falling like a gentle slab of light that will ultimately loosen and dissolve the crusted suspicion, the timely self-hatred, the efficient cold directness, the horrible good manners, the sensible resolves and the senseless nights spent waiting in utter abandon, that have grown up to be you in the tree with no view; and place you firmly in the good-natured circle of your ancestors’ games and entertainments.
Trefoil
Imagine some tinkling curiosity from the years back—
The fashions aren’t old enough yet to look out of fashion.
It is a picture of patient windows, with trees
Of two minds half-caught in their buzz and luster,
The froth of everyone’s ideas as personal and skimpy as ever.
The windows taught us one thing: a great, square grief
Not alleviated or distracted by anything, since the pattern
Must establish itself before it can grow old, cannot weather nicely
Keeping a notion of squirrels and peacocks to punctuate
Chapters of fine print as they are
ground down, growing ever finer
To assume the strict title of dust someday. No, there is no room now
For oceans, blizzards: only night, with fingers of steel
Pressing the lost lid, searching forever unquietly the mechanism
To unclasp all this into warbled sunlight, the day
The gaunt parson comes to ask for your hand. Nothing is flying,
Sinking; it is as though the resistance of all things
To the earth were so much casual embroidery, years
In the making, barely glimpsed at the appointed time.
Through it all a stiffness persists
Of someone who had changed her mind, moved by your arguments
And waiting till the last possible moment to confess it,
To let you know you were wanted, even a lot, more than you could
Imagine. But all that is, as they say, another story.
Problems
Rough stares, sometimes a hello,
A something to carry. Yes and over it
The feeling of one to one like leaves blowing
Between this imaginary, real world and the sky
Which is sometimes a terrible color
But is surely always and only as we imagine it?
I forgot to say there are extra things.
Once, someone—my father—came to me and spoke
Extreme words amid the caution of the time.
I was too drunk, too scared to know what was being said
Around us then, only that it was a final
Shelving off, that it was now and never,
The way things would come to pass.
You can subscribe to this.
It always lets you know how well
You’re doing, how well along the thing is with its growing.
Was it a pattern of wheat
On the spotted walls you wanted to show me
Or are these the things always coming,
The churning, moving support that lets us rock still?
A Wave
To pass through pain and not know it,
A car door slamming in the night.
To emerge on an invisible terrain.
So the luck of speaking out
A little too late came to be worshipped in various guises: