Hotel Lautréamont

by John Ashbery

  I knelt and listened. There was nothing unusual,

  no appearance of impropriety. Meals were prepared again,

  the summer’s sheaf raided, rains drowned the meadows pell-mell

  under the eyes of peasants. Is what I’m being singled

  out for, to tell of this, while the main population

  of truants escapes over nearby hills? If so, so be it:

  I’ve taken my stand and am pretty much prepared

  to let it wear me out. Nor does the crucible of what we said

  out of turn return to urge a new complacency, quiet

  between the paws of the sphinx, nor does anything electrical have to interfere.

  I know the air itself is noxious. I must breathe it

  for those who can’t; only let the nodes be protected from themselves

  that in some joyous valley, far from here, picnicking

  can occur under the vines, and the

  tiniest constituents be sorted and drained, and approved.

  The opposition has its way

  always. See that neon fence? It spells out too much common sense,

  which is a good thing, in the sense that memory is voided.

  Afterwards, the monoliths grow untended;

  something strange and seedy in the sky though centralization

  has finally been realized after how many decades

  of struggle and one may live

  in these little homes, with their gardens, and all

  be complete for a few more years. But I think the stealth

  is a parasite hidden in it somewhere, that soon

  other towns and banks discourage newcomers and there is a shortage

  of the most vital commodities and even time

  has almost run short. Now, tell it to your teachers,

  kids, how well off we were and what you were going to write

  in your essay about the conversion. What is vast is also hollow,

  ragged with age, riddled with false modesty and complaints

  from divers sources, including death. It seems

  the truth was about something else, various and vicious, or it was

  these very elements but mostly

  a protracted span. And when it was over, that was the truth:

  a nest of eggs still hidden, the false flight of a bird.

  A HOLE IN YOUR SOCK

  A man walks at a city

  as though veering off somewhere.

  They extend arms, touch hands.

  This is how it is done, every day.

  My phone is tapped.

  I wish to call the police.

  Not, not obviously, part of the

  “proceedings,”

  the message takes control smoothly.

  We contemplate the shells of crustaceans

  long dead, waiting for the Bronze Age to end.

  We go farther, fare worse.

  And they gave us our little raincoat back.

  Then the government gets into the act

  and the others crowd in and out.

  That was something, sainthood

  of a sort. You have to take it.

  They simply … die. And that’s it.

  When we come back

  in fortuitous weather

  the charm has multiplied beyond the sky,

  is ever so contemporary,

  as an ingredient should be.

  The class marshals, boring thespians

  have walked on. A teardrop

  stands in the middle air.

  This future does us good.

  AND SOCIALIZING

  Back from his breakfast, thirty-five years ago,

  he stumbles, finds in the sun a nod that’s new.

  Which is not to say we are any better off than a second ago.

  These days, by turns solemn and skittish, our days,

  belong to someone who once was here. More we cannot say.

  Yet a vague pathos urges them in our direction.

  “Wait a moment,” it says, “perhaps a compromise

  could be reached, who knows?” But we are in the departure

  mode. All along the autumn, the hunters’

  red coats star the rubbery and decaying foliage:

  “It looks as though it’s been through a lot.”

  So that when we say we are sorry, that was just

  a little growing accomplished too fast, no one hears us.

  The time for trumpets is here, has just passed. Gosh,

  and I was getting up to answer the door, and by the time

  I got there no one was there. Oh, well,

  there’s no use crying over spilled peanuts.

  But I want the one I love to be aware

  that we are all cowards, not just me, and just so

  we have our normal victory in the time that ordinary

  arriving brought, and rooting about

  enthusiastically in search of cohorts;

  and when none are definitively there, why, it has grown cooler

  and we can talk this over endlessly, under the vine,

  quaff the abstract moonlight.

  REVISIONIST HORN CONCERTO

  What more clouds are there to say

  how it all matters to us? Buttons, strings, bits of fluff:

  it’s all there, the vocabulary of displaced images,

  so that if its message doesn’t add up to much, whose

  fault is it? I can imagine casting the answer correctly

  but it doesn’t work, there’s no question implied

  in those gorgeous, plaited ravellings. Only a little

  is known about them, and nothing about their hometowns,

  backgrounds, etc. Really nothing more than a masterful

  way of dealing with silence, of leaving it there, and then

  being off on some expedition. So nothing

  works. But there is nothing there that can harm us.

  Don’t be afraid to let it hurt you, dance it

  under morning’s wire, ponder anew the shuffle between the infinite

  time bomb of the Nile and today’s shoelaces. Besides, these periods

  have a way of elapsing, and the so-called healing process.

  Does anybody care, anymore, where it went? Or whose sleep

  it interrupted with a unique dissonance

  of its own devising? They were always photographing

  the cash register, some men came in and said it should be this way.

  From now on you’re in the proverbial fix. Yet what was promised

  was equal to what was subtracted, while periods of socializing

  in the yard made up for how the money was spent. It wasn’t until

  years later that someone got around to noticing the bald,

  comic error that had been hidden there in the first place

  to equate it with life’s beginning. By then it was in full sail,

  swinging on the gate of how much longer we

  have to lean out of the railroad car, swaying, singing.

  The foul mouth should be caked with mud and weeds by now.

  But we’re not going to let a little thing like that

  spoil this surprise birthday, are we?

  In addition to which the pole

  still turns, in dreams, like the enormous wheel

  of a rickshaw, viewed from up close, now

  dipping into the mud and chaos, now rising like a sigh, a lark

  on the mend, to remind us that all is well, or should be,

  or will be shortly, given the interest in its shadow.

  THE WOMAN THE LION WAS SUPPOSED TO DEFEND

  And sometimes when you want it to it won’t:

  the space around a yodel grows deafening,

  then vomits into the orchestra pit.

  Yet all of this was waiting for me,

  to hug me into accepting what I thought

  I was losing, barrel of light down the stairs.

  You know when we leave home for a
short time

  we can never be sure what that place will be

  when we get back—some yellow tenant gibbering

  in place, or, more likely the furniture

  will be a shade blacker. And of course it’s

  up to you to find out—it’s your problem.

  Which is why I so precisely intuit

  the edge of all you gave to hold back:

  precisely the forlorn edge of the road

  that slices through much of time and ourselves.

  Don’t butter it—the trees

  will be officious; the frog on his own time,

  a bored meter-reader. And if we can’t get off the bus

  why men we’ll adore that patch of leopard-gray

  where the schoolchildren would have assembled.

  And if I had gotten laid—or mislaid—

  somewhere in the cosmos, there was always an ancient

  truth to speak about it. How quietly everything

  conducts to this day past, urges, without pressing,

  nature’s monuments on us, and before you know it

  we have dreamed the spectrum again. Some days

  are for washing (“this is the way we wash our clothes”),

  others for sneaking about, eating. The patchwork girl

  was heard singing in her studio. For a few weeks

  after I got off I was like one possessed—couldn’t

  find the proper forms. The silence was terrible.

  But after being battered by weather and coasts,

  something creamy slips in, a wedge

  more or less of the temper that compounded you,

  drafted you, waited for you to fall, oversaw.

  The sledge of ice melts in spring sun—

  more water to weep over. Soon the first picnics …

  But they led to the black cove

  pirates used to drown each other in. What was

  contracted for is now scaffolding, steeped in blue.

  We have ways to keep in touch with you.

  HARBOR ACTIVITIES

  The prospect: roofs and more roofs.

  Look for a street-guide too:

  anything that will attract a name.

  But it doesn’t mean that the getting-together

  of the newborn

  casts the Lumpen in a definitive shape

  like a rafter. The clots,

  cloth slits, upended

  breezes could be imagined by no human wizard.

  The stalls they take down argue

  impenetrably. That’s good. In a month’s time

  when the bicycle’s eye scrutinizes

  this landscape, we’ll be vapid and know how.

  Every hand has a player;

  every player a new hand.

  Casting for consciousness like an angler,

  you make them stop to admire you.

  What greater form, better force, than this?

  This spreading out over the page

  of someone’s newspaper at breakfast?

  A small thing nevertheless,

  for piano left-hand,

  for piano four-hands.

  Later, we take the train.

  IT MUST BE SOPHISTICATED

  There are attics in old houses

  where doubt lingers as to the corrosive

  effect of night-blindness: namely,

  are its victims directly linkable to a chain

  of events happening elsewhere? If so,

  we should shrug off resemblances

  to our line of work. What was said around

  the house had undue influence on one of several

  shapely witnesses. And, as dames do,

  she started talking to any and every

  interlocutor out of harm’s way. One day

  you wake up and they’ve skipped. Or was it

  always empty like this? It’s hard

  to remember a time when it wasn’t. Maybe

  your memory’s playing tricks on you? Maybe

  there never was such a person as Lisa Martins?

  Maybe it’s all over when you stand up

  to walk the last mile in Enna Jettick shoes,

  and they draw the blind quickly to forget you.

  Once forgotten you’re as good as dead,

  anyway. And who would help you now?

  You might as well be trapped at the bottom of a well

  in the Sahara. They don’t know you’re alive,

  or that your life was anything but exemplary

  when it came time for you to live.

  The fashionable present keeps queening it

  over the slightly dishonorable past. Your

  bridesmaids are scattered on the wind.

  You don’t feel like having lunch. Maybe

  a walk, and a cup of tea later?

  We’ll see you at the end of the month!

  they cried. Now it keeps ticking,

  there must be a mystery down there,

  darn it. I’ll find it if it takes all night

  and then some other sleuth can solve it.

  I was only hired as a go-between. My tour is ended,

  and if I’ve a piece of advice for you, it’s

  check out the rafters, the mouldings.

  You can’t tell who might have bargained

  for clemency in your absence, leaving you holding

  the bag when you got back, restless,

  ready to start school, but the vagrant air’s black,

  what with the negative promise of spring.

  The boys are still rehearsing their parts

  they haven’t been over, and really

  it’s none of my business. Said the table to the chair.

  I was confined here. That’s all I know,

  truthfully. During the amnesty I walked

  out through the open gate. The streets were full of people,

  running back and forth, talking disjointedly. I was

  supposed to be somewhere else, but no one knew it.

  In the confusion I returned home.

  Now the newshounds pester us daily.

  What was I born for? More experiments?

  Why are they fighting over a fuse? It doesn’t

  seem to be harmless like those people are listening to over there;

  at the same time, everyone’s a suspect in the new

  climate and country. The wind turns a page

  of the old tome, then another and another; soon

  it’s riffling through them too fast to stop.

  There’s nothing in it anyway. Time to move on

  to another frontier beyond the transparent frieze

  of foliage, guns, barges, to where he began.

  Sure, dem days is gone forever, but it’s the attention span

  that’s really gone. Back when they’d send for you

  once they got a house built, it was clever

  to hedge your bets and produce a fraternal twin

  made of bedclothes with a mop for a wig

  while you scaled the wall on a rope ladder

  to be the next new thing that thinks

  and cautions others not to. Far from the

  inner city of conflicting attitudes, one fled with one’s

  holy illusions intact, one’s misconceptions too, until the whole

  mindset took on a largely symbolic

  look, an indifferent jewel, toy

  of the weather, of successive washes of light.

  I can hardly believe I’m here

  in this tiny republic carved out of several conflicting

  principalities. It’s enough, perhaps, that I was questioned

  at the edge of my performance. That now I’m safe

  from my own sang-froid and scores of others,

  that mere forgetfulness can save up to fifty-three lives,

  that they can share your power and go on glancing

  upward. Because after all we were the three

  original ones, the presiden
t, vice-president and treasurer

  of our class. And were formed to repay

  what obscure debt and be summarily

  taken out of school and handed over to our parents.

  It’s what matters then, and after. No one

  says you have to live up to principles; indeed, what are they?

  What difference does it make which one came too close

  in the richly darkened theater, if all

  they were after was to coax you into the light,

  watch you blink a minute, and then pass on, they too,

  to the larger arenas, each in the wind,

  in the sand, the reeds, growing? Because even if it doesn’t

  punish you exactly, the thing has been

  lived through, the experience sealed.

  O what book shall I read

  now? for they are all of them new, and used,

  when I write my name on the flyleaf. Look,

  here is another one unread, not written. Time for you to choose.

  ALBORADA

  My friend, how are you?

  I write with my mouth full

  of crumbs in this waning summer city

  as ruby grains sink majestically

  to the bottom of day and others float

  up past them, into something that speaks of cloud.

  Do we all know we’re aspected—

  frightened, rather, while what comes as a ghost

  continues as street life, pausing

  to hitch a stocking, rambunctious, reproved,

  all over the partings?

  O if it were the thickness of a book,

  laminated, or worse, into the meaning of chapters

  that overlay one another like a horse’s blankets.

  But what shoots up, will.

  Another day he likened it to the roar

  of Paris traffic, how expensive it all seemed at first;

  later, a sparrow. Besides they all get out of their cars,

  stoop, and notice. Then the first one’s

  risen, in men’s eyes. Her bathing suit

  took first prize but I have to say climate never

  nourished luck more, nor came out as an extraordinary

  pencilled thing draped across rooftops

  for all to see, till they saw, and the resultant gold-rush

  landed us in the pokey. Here, as ever, some

  are believers. Top-notch achievers.

  In this way one gets to do it

  and become one’s self. Never

  again did the small matter of a raised

  skylight’s hasp sicken the winter, the kitten.

  By evening only the thought rained.