Can You Hear, Bird: Poems

by John Ashbery

  Chronic Symbiosis

  These things can be arranged, he said.

  Besides, glitter has become reasonable again.

  Hadn’t you heard? For one irrational second I thought

  today’s subject was plagiarism, as symbolized

  by that desk. But no, it’s joy

  in never knowing, in having once known,

  and in its still not being too late to know.

  Yes, but I know now that I knew

  long ago when children

  around me grew. Some I liked, others

  probably not as much. And from that the road to living sped

  ever onward, brambles in its hair, dark patches

  under the trees where no moon was. Which means I guess

  I can summon all objects from their shelves,

  sucked with us into the vacuum-cleaner bag

  the open road is. Quick, tell me a story

  that I may repeat it with minor variations

  and the job be over. Rakes and shovels lean beside

  the open door this evening with a special luster

  all their own, that they can’t know. And I,

  I was spirited away by a handsome enchanter

  to a medium-sized city not twenty miles from here

  and live my life as I can hear and smell it. No grouch

  am I, yet hardly an earth-mother either. That’s

  what befalls most of us plagiarists. We write steadily

  away in a barn, with straw and bam swallows for company,

  mindless of inspiration or imagination. We have everything

  we need for today. We can feed it to crows.

  Collected Places

  When you come on,

  I respond more sweetly.

  But the key is laced in

  a travesty,

  much like the dead man’s cane.

  For generations I went to bed because I was asleep.

  Something overt about the silence

  and how we traded its futures

  for chameleons, shenanigans.

  I feel as though I just woke up,

  which of course I just did,

  my head at your thigh.

  Is there any place known to the coast,

  I mean this one, that rides

  us so severely, yanking the bridle,

  digging its stirrups in, that will leave

  a pine forest and jam in the holes in the sieve

  of my memory, when the adders have slept?

  Order it then open,

  longitude stricken from the record.

  And where is the dismal mouse

  that will affront me for so little?

  There is retching in the sky,

  a blue pencil box

  for the sores we own and still wear,

  a nodding as of rabbits, or storks.

  And the head is still miles away.

  I fear you cannot read this.

  I shall make amends

  in some other book, but not today,

  not until the horseless carriage is reinvented

  in the free land of our screams

  and the remainder can be calculated

  exactly, morning and confrontational cliffs,

  a place you want to hear.

  Coming Down from New York

  The harshness isn’t intentional.

  It’s the dark side of these frightful enterprises

  that would otherwise leave us washed by the sun

  in extravagant attitudes, situations

  only the insufficiently trained ought to try.

  Dangerous Moonlight

  Of course you will. It happens even after you’re dead.

  Or, in some cases, the results are positive, but the verdict

  negative. “In such a muddle,” you said, and “all muddled up.”

  I wish I could help but I’ve a million things to do

  and restoring your peace of mind isn’t one of them. There goes my phone …

  The professor’s opinion on all this was: “Well, he leaps around,

  doesn’t he, your little surgeon-poet. Seems to lead an agitated life

  on the surface, but if you really listen to him you find he’s got

  everything down pat. Knows where his bread is buttered, and his ass.

  I could open a drawer of rhetorical footnotes, translated from

  the Japanese or Old Church Slavonic, if I felt like it, and in there’d

  be something that rhymes with him and his coziness, his following the trail

  all the way back to its point of origin. Plus his lively friendliness, which

  coexists, numinously I grant, with a desire to inflict harm.

  There is a poetry in mere existence,

  the kind that shopkeepers and people walking along the street lead,

  you know, and evenness, that fills them up to whatever brim

  is there, and stays, transient, all the days of their lives.

  Such enharmonics are not for your poet-person. He sees, and breeds:

  Otherwise the game isn’t worth the candle to him. He’d as soon rhyme breeze

  with breathes, as walk over to that fire hydrant in the grass

  to examine it, see what it’s made of, make sure it’s not an idea in some

  philosopher’s mind, that will bruise and cloud over once that mind’s

  removed, leaving but a dubious trace of itself, like a ring of puffball dust …”

  Suppose we grant its power of conserving to listening,

  so it’s really a full-fledged element in the creative process.

  Well, others have done just that from time immemorial,

  when women wore tall cones on their heads with sails attached to them.

  But, as mattering ages, it hardens into something smooth like good luck,

  no longer kinetic. Then you can listen all you want

  at palace doors, creaky vents …

  This imploring process is twofold. First, let’s not forget its root

  in implosive. That’s something it’s got up its sleeve.

  Did you ever see an anarchist without his round bomb?

  And then the someone that’s got to be implored,

  how does he fit in? I’ll tell you: like a wedge that was subtracted

  from a wheel of cheese, and is replaced, so that it fits perfectly;

  no one can see where the cut was. Well, that’s

  poetic argument for you. It stands on its own (“The cheese stands alone”),

  but can at the drop of a speculation be seen again as a part,

  a vital one, of the mucus cloud that is generalized human thought aimed at

  a quarrel or a rebus in the lining. And that’s the way

  we get old with poetry. Comes a time when no one has a notion

  of anything else, and the odor of fried brains contends

  with the damp of vacant ancestral halls, to their mutual

  betterment, actually. Here, hand me that cod …

  Debit Night

  We were coming down from the city the city is where you come when you don’t want to listen or be excused from listening. It is a hard hat out and some days “stiletto” heels—but who told you about hat we don’t know about hat too much or about how “hat” grows. Coming down we passed through a former violet producing center. Around World War I there were maybe a hundred violet farms in this region of New York state conducive to violets. It is a very labor intensive thing now there are no longer any except one or two. Up until the end of World War II it was the fashion for ladies to wear bunches of violets but then

  it changed. Now no one had any use for them. Now everyone likes violets I don’t see. Yes but you don’t see anybody wearing them or buying any. Some even think of them as weeds. Nevertheless the former violet business has left its trace in place-names here such as Violet Lane and Violet Hill. They are beautiful aren’t they until you stop to think that violets could be weeds and of a reason why n
obody buys them anymore. Yes but I will still think the

  names

  A sandbox sometimes had weeds growing in it including one that looked like a dandelion only it was tall and thrifty. Always was the sand more beautiful after the rain when there was a dried wet crust on top with pebblelike pores starring its surface. But mostly it was out of sight. There was not a window of the house where it wasn’t around the corner so naturally it is seen less and thus gets worn into the mind like a crease in a road map that has been folded up the wrong way too many times.

  Jana prefers the city. Says there’s more light in it, or the light gets divided up by the streets more so a little goes a long way. Light is something that should not be wasted so as to produce its maximum effect as it is even on some boulevards where it stretches out too much, too wide and too long into the future. This is true but in the country it gets more soaked up in the bushes and buildings so a little more is always required and a little more is all there is. In the city you can eavesdrop on brick walls and this is called “repointing.” What comes up in the inevitable ensuing conversation is sure funny but doesn’t look ahead to the future of philosophy or decide how life should ultimately be lived. There is no conversation even about half-serious things like the theater. Instead everybody makes a unique little mess like a child shitting in its pants that’s proud of it. The auto horns scare everything near away anyhow. The place pivots; this has already been patented. You can go down to sleep by the river or in a movie. See that boat? It’s real.

  So after we had done the chores and brought back living to the house there was something on its mind like a ball of yarn. Yes, a ball of yarn is what is there as I wanted to say. Say, stay anyway will you? I might. I’ve got things to do. Yes, but this is one of them. That’s true. But I still have things to do I might go. Oh no you’re not. Oh no? Okay then I really will stay because I want to really. Really she said? Then I will show you this dried crust of bread which is the truth, you must never forget it. Oh I never will I said it’s what I wanted all along. How many acres do you want? Oh I never sought them they always came to me until quite recently. Indeed? Well here comes another one it’s green or black. It must be yours she said. You played the mandrake right. Yes well here comes another and a whole lot of them. By George she said we should have been ready for them, but that’s the way

  it is you can’t be and you are. Think of World War I, it’s green and black and surely there was less daylight around then, more fog and boats on the East River with people lining up to go on them. Yes it was a premonition of these our times she said and so I conjure you, don’t go around telling what you know to people, you are likely to get it back. Then peace, of a sort? The high-minded sun combs the tallest man-made structures on earth and then you get a little peace and some darkness down in the lobbies where everything begins to happen. No one in his handsome and enduring stable. Just having to endure is like going for the jugular but it should be a caravanserai. The problem is to get over what is being endured but hasn’t been and to make for the middle distance, after the teacups and primulas but before philosophy and “last things,” where thighs shine astride dim neighboring curbs and strangers greet you convulsively. These are more last things, I think, to think about

  all along along what I wanted all along

  Do Husbands Matter?

  Let’s get this going again. It might work. To ask pardon …

  These days I am much on the cliffs. I like cliffs. They lead to

  a nice breeze …

  Forests of fire hatch the soupstone factory.

  When they get infected they tend to gyrate,

  sometimes a lot.

  Trees come to stand in for the scenery that’s missing.

  Well, and what might that be? Well, trees of course. The occasional shrub.

  The windjammer’s jammed again. Solemn, small porticoes.

  Stone steps leading down into the ground. Potatoes.

  And you don’t even know them.

  Did it seem perfect then?

  The townside, sea of troubles, value, money.

  Dr. Driscoll will be here soon

  with his decoder. Meanwhile, everybody

  just stand still. If yawl

  don’t move it will summon the laser legs.

  In a matter of hours we can be on the high seas

  where marriages are consummated

  and amazon drummers croon

  and we encounter the order of the day.

  At last, we can split hairs.

  I needn’t remind you how much of the mirror-ball is in this, nor

  how such states are very much the exception to the general rule of not interfering.

  Even then the interpersonal

  has been around, hedges its bets

  as though this were a matter of some gravity,

  though no one can stake it out, or even know

  very well what it happens to be.

  This much I could hesitantly aver

  and turn into a saga, that melts next day

  like an iceberg towed into tropical waters.

  That’s an unusual boat: wearied-seeming,

  caught in the cleft of a dream,

  or is it something you just wear, like diaries

  on special occasions, while welcomes are wearing out

  and tall men have come to eat

  mattress-insides, this time.

  O the woman lay in the longboat.

  Sometimes it comes from even farther back.

  Dull Mauve

  Twenty miles away, in the colder

  waters of the Atlantic, you gaze longingly

  toward the coast. Didn’t you once love someone

  there? Yes, but it was only a cat, and I,

  a manatee, what could I do? There are no rewards

  in this world for pissing your life away, even

  if it means you get to see forgotten icebergs

  of decades ago peeling off from the mass

  to dive under the surface, raising a

  mountain of seething glass before they lunge back up

  to start the unknown perilous journey

  to the desolate horizon.

  That was the way

  I thought of each day when I was young, a sloughing-off,

  both suicidal and imbued with a certain ritual grace.

  Later, there were so many protagonists

  one got quite lost, as in a forest of doppelgängers.

  Many things were going on. And the moon, poised

  on the ridge like an enormous, smooth grapefruit, understood

  the importance of each and wasn’t going

  to make one’s task any easier, though we loved her.

  Eternity Sings the Blues

  Music lovers everywhere

  endorse it—just thought I’d let

  you know it’s National Frivolity Week

  again. Will they ever get done

  with these things? Stop commercializing ’em?

  Music and worry—the two most terrible

  things a man can know. How about

  women? Strangely, they come off better

  just by observing things. This hundred-year-old

  inkstone is evidence enough of that. How so?

  But music, played by a gifted child,

  is just about the finest thing anywhere.

  Puts me in mind of a cigar

  I smoked in a picket line once. They all thought

  the boss hired me to do it. Now I ask you.

  But I kept on smoking. The point is, when you spot

  worry, you have to move straight in through

  the flanks it invariably leaves unprotected.

  I am cussed now,

  more worse than ever, yet I never

  bequeathed an orange to an orphan,

  or padlocks to a mechanic. I had too much

  to do, too much fun getting out of there

  into another house of which I remember little.

 
Oh the places I’ve lived. Airplanes to London,

  and then it was hard not to uproot the rancid

  stalk of romanticism, so I left it there

  as an experiment. Soon the fairies was buzzing

  round my head. I got out of there real fast.

  Why do these dreams of worry plague you?

  You seem like such a comfortable man.

  Aye, I am that, but I’m also terrible

  in the northeast. Wasn’t it D. W. Griffith

  who said, “You don’t know what it’s like to have a big nose”?

  And so we dream some of the same dreams,

  him and me together—of kitchens, and bushes outside ’em,

  and a woman who hides behind a tree,

  waiting for the keyboard of her youth to unravel

  in unsightly seams over the pavement.

  Absolutely nothing he or she does

  escapes my vigilant attention. But if you’ll wait here

  I’ll go over and see what that car wants.

  Oh stop that—now you really are

  learning to be boring. Soon no one will want you

  except for the occasional syphilitic barmaid,

  and then what will your urine tests prove?

  Better a spotted record than a tarnished silver thread

  I always tells them. It’s true, nobody will unveil me.

  I’ve slept with my feet in the spittoon, with only

  a pair of chopsticks for a pillow.

  I’ve been deferred. And all because some runt

  of a chameleon put a curse on me once, mixing me

  up with his oafish brother-in-law.

  Is that any way to begin a life?

  And long after my Enoch Arden–like return

  to the world of discos and lemon groves, his words

  return to haunt me still: Avast,

  ye pantyhose-wearing, portmanteau-carrying,

  bleached-out denizen! Return to the sea that vomited you

  on its shore one fatal August afternoon. Begone!

  So must I carry this paddle

  forever, until I find a sucker who’ll buy it

  for less than I paid for it. So runs this carousel

  we call life.

  Yet for those not snookered

  by it, a fatal balm mollifies

  susceptibility to drafts, and mild

  allergies, or are they transgressions in disguise?