Can You Hear, Bird: Poems

by John Ashbery

  Anxiety and Hardwood Floors

  Only a breath of this region

  spindles me off and growing, yes, again.

  How fine to be late in the season

  where the hopeless hide their fetters

  in chains of golden hair. Its air

  wants nothing to do with any of us. Yet if I am

  the strong man at the post office, as the clock’s nine

  o’clock tells me I am, why it will go better for the all

  of us in here. This living

  room he taunts me with. But everybody can see the

  sun, abashed and unashamed, pummeling through the rusted

  curtains. Pass me that box of gin,

  will you?

  At First I Thought I Wouldn’t

  Say Anything About It

  but then I thought keeping quiet about it might appear even ruder.

  At first I thought I had died and gone to heaven

  but that scapegrace the unruly sun informed me otherwise.

  I am in my heavyset pants and find this occupation of beekeeper charming

  though I have yet to meet my first bee.

  We don’t know if I get to keep the hat and veil.

  “Too hot,” he said. “Too hot for everything!”

  He so caring, so mundane. “ … to have you on board.”

  Bulgarian choirs everywhere stood up and sang the song of the rent.

  It was lovely. Now I shall take a short vacation,

  proof that I am needed here. Nobody wants my two cents

  anymore, I believe. To some it was like skating in summer.

  A small turret perched over the lake. It exploded.

  That’s the way I feel about people taking me out

  to some nice repast, and afterwards you go home and

  go over everything that was stated. I prefer flowers and breathing.

  At Liberty and Cranberry

  The car bounds forward eagerly, and for a moment

  it’s like Madrid: a taste of cinnamon and something

  almost too unimportant to mention. A sense of morning

  without any of the particulars that morning is,

  that it inhabits, all of them, individually.

  And yes we invited the fish

  over again to tell about high school and yes

  he came apologetically and mentioned sodomy parenthetically

  until we all played cards and it was time to go.

  Everybody realized

  there had been such a beautiful evening.

  Yet if I want to take you on my lap

  and be romantic—well, or use the word “romantic”

  several times and bring up the faded question

  of sentiment and sentimentality, like faded lips

  on a post, I’m allowed to be only monastic and neat,

  while the cute are always with us,

  are all around us, out on the bay, the river,

  like a miniature armada

  with an ad on every sail.

  Go back through here, it says,

  you didn’t come up this way, but through here

  you’ll find it’s very nice.

  And, unruffled, we do.

  Atonal Music

  The hamlet stroked its reflection in a

  plum—it wasn’t crooning now, not for generic

  supplies, anyway. They are lowering hoops

  from houses, the whole thing’s very much up in the air.

  I twiddle my thumbs in a doorway, look

  out from time to time. It’s fine to reminisce,

  but no one really cares about your childhood,

  not even you. It’s not even that, or a past,

  but an aesthetic remoteness blossoming profusely

  but vaguely around what does

  stand out here and there: a window square, a bone

  left by an intrepid dog. You own

  them but may not appreciate them—they’re

  too mortal for that, for you.

  I woke in the night to hear a runnel

  coursing down my mansard—damn!

  I’d left the trapdoor ratcheted. It all

  smears me, like scenery. I can

  only be ambient.

  They observed me once, you know.

  Awful Effects of Two Comets

  There will not always be a step

  to the undoing of the rightness you now so justly feel

  in the edge of Hong Kong where it’s all right to buy spirits. The

  canal crowd threw fetters at him.

  Then there will not always be a stair

  to punish the unborn and the boy who said he’d rather

  do it on another day. There is a chair,

  its arms rubbed almost bare from excess living.

  There is a fan I think over there.

  Otherwise we make no money off them.

  They’re not worth importing, only to smoke

  the tips of and then the whole magazine

  goes up, to some surprise and cheers

  on the part of petite nudist pedestrians

  who can make nothing rise,

  not even your eyes, which, seriously, I love

  staring at and making love to:

  I, a merchant from over the hill

  with hunger and a big cow to fill.

  … by an Earthquake

  A hears by chance a familiar name, and the name involves a riddle of the past.

  B, in love with A, receives an unsigned letter in which the writer states that she is the mistress of A and begs B not to take him away from her.

  B, compelled by circumstances to be a companion of A in an isolated place, alters her rosy views of love and marriage when she discovers, through A, the selfishness of men.

  A, an intruder in a strange house, is discovered; he flees through the nearest door into a windowless closet and is trapped by a spring lock.

  A is so content with what he has that any impulse toward enterprise is throttled.

  A solves an important mystery when falling plaster reveals the place where some old love letters are concealed.

  A-4, missing food from his larder, half believes it was taken by a “ghost.”

  A, a crook, seeks unlawful gain by selling A-8 an object, X, which A-8 already owns.

  A sees a stranger, A-5, stealthily remove papers, X, from the pocket of another stranger, A-8, who is asleep. A follows A-5.

  A sends an infernal machine, X, to his enemy, A-3, and it falls into the hands of A’s friend, A-2.

  Angela tells Philip of her husband’s enlarged prostate, and asks for money.

  Philip, ignorant of her request, has the money placed in an escrow account.

  A discovers that his pal, W, is a girl masquerading as a boy.

  A, discovering that W is a girl masquerading as a boy, keeps the knowledge to himself and does his utmost to save the masquerader from annoying experiences.

  A, giving ten years of his life to a miserly uncle, U, in exchange for a college education, loses his ambition and enterprise.

  A, undergoing a strange experience among a people weirdly deluded, discovers the secret of the delusion from Herschel, one of the victims who has died. By means of information obtained from the notebook, A succeeds in rescuing the other victims of the delusion.

  A dies of psychic shock.

  Albert has a dream, or an unusual experience, psychic or otherwise, which enables him to conquer a serious character weakness and become successful in his new narrative, “Boris Karloff.”

  Silver coins from the Mojave Desert turn up in the possession of a sinister jeweler.

  Three musicians wager that one will win the affections of the local kapellmeister’s wife; the losers must drown themselves in a nearby stream.

  Ardis, caught in a trap and held powerless under a huge burning glass, is saved by an eclipse of the sun.

  Kent has a dream so vivid that it seems a part of his waking experience.

  A a
nd A-2 meet with a tragic adventure, and A-2 is killed.

  Elvira, seeking to unravel the mystery of a strange house in the hills, is caught in an electrical storm. During the storm the house vanishes and the site on which it stood becomes a lake.

  Alphonse has a wound, a terrible psychic wound, an invisible psychic wound, which causes pain in flesh and tissue which, otherwise, are perfectly healthy and normal.

  A has a dream which he conceives to be an actual experience.

  Jenny, homeward bound, drives and drives, and is still driving, no nearer to her home than she was when she first started.

  Petronius B. Furlong’s friend, Morgan Windhover, receives a wound from which he dies.

  Thirteen guests, unknown to one another, gather in a spooky house to hear Toe reading Buster’s will.

  Buster has left everything to Lydia, a beautiful Siamese girl poet of whom no one has heard.

  Lassie and Rex tussle together politely; Lassie, wounded, is forced to limp home.

  In the Mexican gold rush a city planner is found imprisoned by outlaws in a crude cage of sticks.

  More people flow over the dam and more is learned about the missing electric cactus.

  Too many passengers have piled onto a cable car in San Francisco; the conductor is obliged to push some of them off.

  Maddalena, because of certain revelations she has received, firmly resolves that she will not carry out an enterprise that had formerly been dear to her heart.

  Fog enters into the shaft of a coal mine in Wales.

  A violent wind blows the fog around.

  Two miners, Shawn and Hillary, are pursued by fumes.

  Perhaps Emily’s datebook holds the clue to the mystery of the seven swans under the upas tree.

  Jarvis seeks to manage Emily’s dress shop and place it on a paying basis. Jarvis’s bibulous friend, Emily, influences Jarvis to take to drink, scoffing at the doctor who has forbidden Jarvis to indulge in spirituous liquors.

  Jarvis, because of a disturbing experience, is compelled to turn against his friend, Emily.

  A ham has his double, “Donnie,” take his place in an important enterprise.

  Jarvis loses his small fortune in trying to help a friend.

  Lodovico’s friend, Ambrosius, goes insane from eating the berries of a strange plant, and makes a murderous attack on Lodovico.

  “New narrative” is judged seditious. Hogs from all over go squealing down the street.

  Ambrosius, suffering misfortune, seeks happiness in the companionship of Joe, and in playing golf.

  Arthur, in a city street, has a glimpse of Cathy, a strange woman who has caused him to become involved in a puzzling mystery.

  Cathy, walking in the street, sees Arthur, a stranger, weeping.

  Cathy abandons Arthur after he loses his money and is injured and sent to a hospital.

  Arthur, married to Beatrice, is haunted by memories of a former sweetheart, Cornelia, a heartless coquette whom Alvin loves.

  Sauntering in a park on a fine day in spring, Tricia and Plotinus encounter a little girl grabbing a rabbit by its ears. As they remonstrate with her, the girl is transformed into a mature woman who regrets her feverish act.

  Running up to the girl, Alvin stumbles and loses his coins.

  In a nearby dell, two murderers are plotting to execute a third.

  Beatrice loved Alvin before he married.

  B, second wife of A, discovers that B-3, A’s first wife, was unfaithful.

  B, wife of A, dons the mask and costume of B-3, A’s paramour, and meets A as B-3; his memory returns and he forgets B-3, and goes back to B.

  A discovers the “Hortensius,” a lost dialogue of Cicero, and returns it to the crevice where it lay.

  Ambrose marries Phyllis, a nice girl from another town.

  Donnie and Charlene are among the guests invited to the window.

  No one remembers old Everett, who is left to shrivel in a tower.

  Pellegrino, a rough frontiersman in a rough frontier camp, undertakes to care for an orphan.

  Ildebrando constructs a concealed trap, and a person near to him, Gwen, falls into the trap and cannot escape.

  By Guess and by Gosh

  Even so, we have forgotten their graves.

  I swear to you I will not beat one drum in your absence.

  And the beasts of night will not forget their crimes,

  nor the others their roly-polyness.

  It was in a garage where tire irons jangled in the breeze

  to the accompaniment of flyswatters functioning

  that we first heard of that Phoenician sailor

  and how when the tide was out he would pretend to be

  the Flying Dutchman on one of his infrequent shore leaves

  to garner a spouse. But he was all red with jewels—

  not rubies, cheap gems. And his incisors struck fear

  in the hearts of the entourage. Nevertheless, many

  were the maidens who considered him an option,

  though they always ended by rejecting it. Some said it was his breath,

  others, the driven cornsilk of his hair. Perhaps

  it was the lack of something called “personable,”

  though I think I don’t even want to know what that is, I’ll follow

  my heart over warm oceans of Chinese lounge music

  until the day the badger coughs up that secret,

  though first we must discover the emetic,

  the one I told you about.

  Confused minions swarmed on the quarterdeck.

  No one was giving orders anymore. In fact it was quite a while

  since any had been issued. Who’s in charge here?

  Can’t anyone stop the player piano before it rolls us

  in the trough of a tidal wave? How did we get to be so many?

  I wonder what’s playing at the local movie theater.

  Some Hitchcock or other, for there are many fanciers

  in these unsightly parts. And who would want mothers

  for supper?

  Can You Hear, Bird

  And for all the days it doesn’t happen

  something does happen,

  solid and nutritional like a wrapped steak

  tossed on a counter. At first I couldn’t believe the thirst;

  soon, so soon, it becomes average and airy,

  a fixture. Precept to be toyed with.

  The road started to get rough with me.

  A mere 800 feet away the car wept

  on its blocks

  and little Peter came and looked around and went away.

  It was kind of a mistake and he went away.

  It was a kind mistake, breezes over dashboard.

  Twin violins sew

  a fine seam;

  a paw slips over the face of the clock,

  laggards and dudgeons in between.

  All I meant to suggest was the negative of what has

  been done surges and slops against fifth-floor windows

  in the time it takes to anchor a tricycle.

  And we full of such courtesy,

  blind to the days and it seems their systems the night,

  teetering on a board’s edge;

  sure and the unrolled film fans out

  in suns like a dolphin or a skate’s wing.

  After all who blubbered the truth

  It wasn’t I

  Cantilever

  I knew we should have stopped back there

  by the pudding station

  but the pudding people were so—well—

  full of themselves.

  The Sphinx didn’t want us to come this far

  even though we answered her questions

  and threw in a bonus answer: “As honey is to the jaguar.”

  And we so well all along too—

  Coming up is the world’s longest single cantilever span.

  I am numb with thrips.

  Chapter II, Book 35

  He was a soldier
or a Shaker. At least he was doing something,

  going somewhere. Often, in the evenings, he’d rant about Mark Twain,

  how that wasn’t his real name, and was he hiding something?

  If so, then why call himself a humorist?

  We began to tire of his ravings, but (as so often happens)

  it was just at that point that a salient character trait

  revealed itself, or rather, manifested itself within him.

  It was one of those goofy days in August

  when all men (and some women) dream of chocolate sodas.

  He confessed he’d had one for lunch,

  then took us out to the street to show us the whir and dazzle

  of living in some other city, where so much that is different goes on.

  I guess he was inspired by Lahore. Said it came to him

  in his dreams every night. And little by little

  we felt ourselves being transported there. Not that we wanted

  to be there, far from that. But we were either too timid

  or unaware to urge him otherwise. Then he mentioned Timbuktu.

  Said he’d actually been there, that the sidewalks were pink

  and the huts made of mother-of-pearl, not mud, as is commonly

  supposed. Said he’d had the best venison and apple tart

  in his life there.

  Well, we were accompanying him in the daze

  that usually surrounded him, when we began to think about ourselves:

  When was the last time we had done so? And the stranger shifted shape

  again (he was now wearing a Zouave’s culottes), and asked us

  would we want to live in Djibouti, or Providence, or Lyon, now that

  we’d seen them, and we chorused (like frogs), Oh no, we

  want to live in New York, not that the other places aren’t as splendid

  and interesting as you say. It’s just that New York

  feels more like home to us. It’s ugly, it’s dirty, the people are rude

  (kind and rude), and every surface has a fine film of filth

  on it that behooves slobs like us, and will in time turn to diamonds,

  just like the mother-of-pearl shacks in Timbuktu. And he said,

  You know I was wrong about Mark Twain. It was his real name,

  and he was a humorist, a genuine American humorist for the ages.