Hotel Lautréamont

by John Ashbery

With us, sweeps us up into something, some way to be

  With pleasure and not be too long about it so the mood stays

  But isn’t fixed? If only I’d known what I was getting into

  That day in Arizona, I’d have taken another detour, but you see

  When you see gravel, you think roadbed, automatically, forgetting how little

  It takes to set anybody off, buzzing into dreams. Old papers and

  Memoirs. Feet under the desk. A tiny girl who smiles and is prepared.

  What year was that? Who was in power then? By what

  Sin have we been burned? And did the president point

  His pointer at the blackboard to the word “articulate,” and did

  Those feet reiterate the premise, damp down through the ages, fresh, yes,

  But so ancient, like an ague. Teeth chattering, all proceeded to the dump.

  After all, it would be time soon.

  After all, nobody knows how to make this any more. You can’t

  Find us in their lounges. Soon, soon, however, the overpass takes us home.

  The leaves are spent, lying in a ditch. Girls gone. The music, the horses took off.

  THE LITTLE BLACK DRESS

  All that we are trying most defiantly to unravel

  is waiting, close to the path. Yes,

  but the pace is both relaxed and insistent,

  a swimming up from under. Your plan sounds fine.

  I knew a brunette once in Omaha,

  he said, and that struck us as news. He hadn’t

  been out of the truck long. On the dank ground the new

  willow leaves lay, a reproof to him and us.

  Why can’t the clay bind us more firmly still,

  until he can read,

  get something out of these notations that arrive

  every day, like letters, O not in the empty house.

  PART OF THE SUPERSTITION

  Help, when it came, came from an unexpected place.

  It was so nice he couldn’t sleep. Our rooms darken

  with every new place of experience. All roses

  admit this, and life stays on, fidgeting, their dream

  disappointed, on the run, and it’s your fault,

  who never had the courage to know nothing and simultaneously

  be attentive. That’s where the secret comes in,

  and, as you might expect, it’s quite unhandy,

  especially if you’re in a coma. Now I don’t want

  to have to speak to you again; we’re on the way down,

  that much is assured, and leggy growth has to stop somewhere,

  at least it did in my day. About what colors to buy:

  this is something each dean and priest decides

  for himself, and then they melt and turn into the jackpot,

  which is a little disturbing. Don’t squirm,

  however, there are other houses on this road to peace

  we can actually live in, as a snail its shell,

  or bird pants. Then a calend grabs your hand

  and tugs you into the future, and that’s about all the space

  there is left. Wipe your nose. Don’t fudge

  the horizon or it will come clattering down

  on us like the earthquake at Lisbon, but always,

  be brave. Yet these are old wives’ tales,

  in truth; nothing insists you believe in them

  except as dreams, which permeate the background

  of our day like colored raindrops, and so go away

  before too long. Many have turned back

  at this point; the trials, the trails, are thistles,

  inherently unrewarding. Yet those who wish to play

  say many are pleased to be in that day:

  pleased, and not a little scared, but from where

  will peace come if not from those beetling crags?

  So many varied stimuli, and I

  was nigh to frantic, as it may believe you,

  and has for other hosts. Yet these passions, arrayed

  like infantry, continue to absorb and confuse

  by turns. No use shouting about waste, it was

  a necessary corner in your apartment that couldn’t be filled

  by anything but its own besottedness. And we think, when we

  do play, that a special aggravation

  has sunk its beak in us like Prometheus’ eagle,

  yet all proceeds from an inability and desire to win

  leading to narrow channels and bogus expectations.

  Cut short the customary peroration:

  its wings soar o’er us still, or will be, and we, we’ll

  have a hand in sorting them out, strand

  by tinted strand, and be sure a life will arise swollen from this:

  a vacant place in the story. My glory

  when it comes will resemble yours in its feinting

  and the way it orders waiters with soiled aprons around.

  We can be back for much of it. Haste, arise;

  a big thing is happening to everyone. We were so prudent

  in our clothes back there it got forgotten, blurred

  with the wet lawn. And when the president

  looked out his window he saw it, and ran to tell the vice-president,

  and so a compact was kept. I sure wish

  it were possible to pole oneself more than a few feet off this shore,

  but it seems to want us. And I can’t explain how a muskrat

  would ever know about such a thing, yet it did.

  So there were times in between like the seasons

  and the times between them when peaches fall,

  and dancers sift across the stage like leaves,

  and these are dark times. Only remember that the figure

  worked deep into the fabric implodes there;

  has a next, a resting place. It is from the multiplication

  of similar wacko configurations that theses do arise

  to attest the efficacy of this castor oil,

  this medicine. And if why we want to go away

  is as plain as the nose on your face, the buried village,

  cut out of rose-petal limestone, is still standing. Haply

  some faith trickles out of it, and is not lost

  in the glittering grass, but persists to become a torrent,

  then a turret, somewhere else. For there is a key,

  and it leads to your door. Yet it is only repetition, something

  the seasons like a lot. And as you get up to go you mutter,

  and that’s it!—the fortunate crisis that was always

  going to stave us off, and explain so much

  about car wrecks, and postage stamps and the like.

  Farewell in the rain; it is surely lucky to know

  as much as we do, and not to know as much

  as we do. Or were taught was proper. Papers

  will explain it, music it. That’s a promise.

  THE ART OF SPEEDING

  And when some sidle awkwardly,

  why, the grove is green again. There is more than enough catfood

  for two, she said. And I think I belong in this prism.

  Day means more than luck itself to me,

  but I shall be forgotten

  on a shore made monotonous by the inverted hulls of rowboats.

  There is more than enough time for me,

  sympathy too. I’m the cap and bells that don’t belong.

  A free-lance artist. The last and first of the romantics.

  Sometimes a suppler season weaves pliant straws

  into a crown for no one in particular.

  This hiatus is my legacy:

  a patterned map whose symmetries invite exploration

  yet in the end repel the cold traveler, wrapped

  in gray at the end of the mole.

  He sees farther into the rising banister of the city’s rage

  and shuts out all ivory memories like pestile
nce.

  Indeed he is the naked forager.

  But when tomatoes are ripe and girls

  don’t mind, and the sun is civil again, then

  look in your shoeboxes for sheaves of snapshots

  that came over us and were here, wild as the wilderness.

  We forgot who was talking to us on the quay.

  It just might have been a distinguished stranger.

  Now his visor keeps us from noticing

  his general appearance, but genially we all say

  how much we have loved this place, how gay

  are the receipts. All we have to do is stay.

  Yet more pictures are involved than the accountant

  realizes, moaning over his headache: sometimes it agrees

  with us to say we do. And then the game is darker;

  no one pauses in the rain.

  AMERICAN BAR

  We bake a dozen kinds of muffins every day

  yet we are cold and disquieting at heart.

  I fear for his sciatica, though

  we were never lovers.

  Let me memorialize this mattress, M.

  le Comte, he will be decent

  in this fog that emanates from everything

  though the air is fresh and sunny. Thought

  about wandering down to the river to have a

  look at the water. It always has so much to say,

  more than the upended rain barrel in its day

  had. See the monkey in its cage.

  Bright eyes are feasting again and again.

  In the casual track of a zipper my penis

  once got stuck, and it’s been like that ever since:

  feet stop where no snare lives, the best

  is to die down and desist. Perhaps life is better

  near the Arctic Circle, where the buildings are plain

  and no trees sing. One can feel totally indoors.

  The wireless plays a lanky tune;

  there are spots on the wall from the moisture

  you either keep out or keep in. I forget which,

  and what a bird looks like. The winter night drones on

  for centuries, and what keeps us at peace is actually

  the sight of an empty cage

  and a few children’s drawings of it.

  My, we have raced to be equivocally here

  and have invented what sign? Off of what do we climb

  to the lower level, what compact fleet of stairs

  is nestled here? Or did we bowdlerize each other’s delirium

  in fear of having the last word, and it frightened us off the page?

  In any case have a ripping good time. The boars

  will be here around then, as you know.

  FROM PALOOKAVILLE

  “Death cancels all engagements.”

  —Clifton Webb, in the movie Laura

  The midgets stand on giants who stand on midgets

  in Palookaville

  that day of storm notwithstanding and it still takes one

  on out to the “farther reaches” where boys play and maids bay

  at the moon

  in my Palookaville

  where the stench of farts drenches outside irony with the dust of snow

  where all is served up right

  to blond kids in history books on the gothic outskirts

  where everything gets unravelled just right

  where you can see a coincidence coming for miles down the valley

  along the trestle when the snow the femurs the cries

  demur and act unwise

  at a time when centers shatter in strict unison

  when doubt is in the call of the fox

  and the sunsets are like weddings

  I came here of my own accord

  from Djakarta

  I’m as old as you are and dare to say so

  but the falling liaisons spat out like miles of thread

  are the lining of time’s one easy lesson

  the shocks deep and narrow like crevasses dog teams fly over

  over and around

  aiming no way to please

  and it does in the arrested quickness of the visit, task—

  even life is the least bit pejorative

  but not the costumes the calendar

  the trivia the painted trappings

  to come undone

  in your embrace and that’s the word

  You were sent for and that is all

  no word on why some became

  the anvil

  and from here all that runs is dust

  or consommé there was fear smeared again on the walk

  and for two consecutive days

  we go out on it it’s pretty safe

  so far

  on the fifth day a bank fails there are great falls

  and iodine in the little house

  it smells more like an accord this time

  and then there were birds you know too soft

  this time for much

  of an answer

  and they came were there under steel arcades

  the night brings its business along

  stalls as though a feint saved the day one

  other time and now it’s horses all around for anybody that thinks

  they’ve got a contusion or a monopoly

  surely it was warm faces all round

  The accents are distant as bells in that other hometown

  the stories often gory

  tell why please the accents and your own personal vignette came up

  without a number and no one explained the cause

  a dim musicale in some small room

  folded under netting as though the crows stood by

  to watch

  under the felt cushion something impolite zoomed

  it was suggested that we all carry away

  our traces that we dispose of them “thoughtfully”

  so as not to leave any bones of an argument around

  for others mauling traces

  in bushes

  black ones riding with white snow a pure, defined drop

  of atheism and it arches out too wide, too near the circumference

  of the pier too much to say for what an old man did

  on a recent day and what if it comes round

  on a recent day and what if we all did

  and who shoved the pace of the thermometer

  on an outing who shamed the toaster

  who is to say

  ANOTHER EXAMPLE

  Of our example, earth,

  we know the star-shaped universe:

  divisions,

  somewhere,

  of July streets.

  Is it a bucket you sit in

  or on?

  How they led us past the fence.

  The one horse was mortified.

  But it’s unhealthy, you say

  we must have another example,

  just one.

  What’s wanted is faces in windows

  screams that went away a long time ago.

  What says to recall them?

  To be revived like paper ants

  and then endure the long vacuum of pre-eternity

  and still be allowed to buy something

  on the station platform?

  The train is turning away—

  There are no familiar quotations.

  Here, put some on a plate, he said. That’s the way.

  AVANT DE QUITTER CES LIEUX

  They watch the blue snow.

  It is the fifth act in someone else’s life,

  but here, on Midway Island, reefs and shoals interfere

  with that notion. That nothing so compact

  as the idea of a season is to be allowed

  is the note, for today at least. It is Tuesday morning.

  They sing a duet of farewell

  to their little table, and to themselves as they were

  when they sat at it. Noon intersects with fat
birds

  the rhythm of dishes in the cupboard. My love,

  he seems to say, is this the way it is for you? Then we shall have to leave

  these shabby surroundings for others, but first

  I want to plant a kiss like a star

  on your forehead. The ships are knocking together at the quayside,

  the lanyards struck, there is more moving

  than we were intended for, as we clear out

  nodding to the caryatids we pass. Perhaps they will sing to us.

  And in a summer house somewhere in Russia

  a clematis soaks up the heat. One can think without breathing

  of the blue snow that invades the fields, a curse some obscure ancestor

  once let fall and now it’s the custom, duly serenaded each season

  before the apples rust

  and the idea of winter takes over, to be followed in short order

  by the real thing.

  If all of us could lead lives of razoring things out of the newspaper,

  filing them on pincushions … but no. There is the father

  and morning to be dealt with, and after that the students arrive.

  The rhythm is broken up among them.

  That was a cold year, but not

  the last. It will be remembered.

  Why is it you always ask me this, and this:

  is there no question behind the arras of how we now meet

  seconding each other’s projects, our emotions? Or is that too weak

  as a question, though strong enough as an affirmation, so that we again go out

  from each other. One shades one’s eyes automatically, though the sky

  is dark. “We have no place to go” (the fifteenth

  major situation), and if God decrees we like each other, someday

  we will meet on a stone up there, and all will not be well,

  but that is useful. Great rivers run into each other and graves

  have split open, the tyranny of dust plays well, there is

  so little to notice. Besides we have always known each other.

  Except for that it was automatically the century

  before this one. Thus we are made aware of the continuity

  of times that were, and time itself is revealed

  not as a series of rooms but a single corridor

  stretching into the truth: an alpine pasture, with a few goats

  and, in the distance, a hovel. It is high noon. Dinorah,

  who has lost her goat, sings the mad scene for which her life

  has been a preparation, sings it out of daylight, out of the outcropping

  of rock overhead, out of the edelweiss and cowslips.