Can You Hear, Bird: Poems

by John Ashbery

“Be sure of retail,” he says. “The life insurance

  building, the pickle garden. Heaven knows they

  attack our radar too, swoop down on us like bats

  and the mystery illness.”

  Are you Big Bang?

  Point Lookout

  The object of the game is, after all, not to die but to grow into easeful

  death, winning. Forty shopkeepers sinned and for this they were betrayed.

  He seems not to have understood the rules of perspective.

  We have the technology to tame the edges.

  For this we must become hedgehogs again, blindly entertaining all the

  philosophy of light.

  It goes nice and easy like a drink, or remark in a salon.

  All this time we were wishing, we

  wished to hazard an accomplishment or two.

  Come, I’ll play you an old comedy

  of the bartered bear and soothsayer, no ways to be out of doors, no

  thing on the milky plain, the wind dropped. Soft

  from my curlicue she bounces around.

  The animal traces hovered and steamed. The soft shell of a particle

  twists itself off from the name, stands defiant, budged.

  We mourn those who do briefly paddle.

  Poor Knights of Windsor

  Say it was any day.

  A knock on the door, a neoclassic cannonball flies past.

  The hall is done up in scarlet; something more powerful

  than just plain good taste is obviously at work here.

  I agree to share your game with you.

  We saunter on the terrace (Emerson

  said a man should “saunter”). We eat some trail mix.

  Gosh, what a limited bunch of things to do there is.

  Anything that can be done with stale bread

  will sometime be done. The English like to

  twist it and dip it in something till it hardens: the result

  is called “Poor Knights of Windsor.”

  It’s some kind of savory.

  They don’t have those much anymore,

  and we, why we never had them.

  That applies to most things. Not plumbing, though—

  if anything we have too much of that.

  But those knights,

  having to stand by a checkered cloth, pretending

  it was OK by them, this really not much more than a scrap,

  like the rarebit the hunter’s wife tosses him when he comes home late,

  his game bag empty

  his fun exhausted

  ready for a round of Monopoly—

  Does the heraldry impose itself,

  trickling on the forehead

  for all to see?

  Do brands ultimately matter?

  Are the lasses more froward? The lads

  bent over backward? What is this thing

  you wanted me to see? Oh, a shovel. You might have said so.

  And the way back is polluted, the spears

  almost indecent.

  Quick Question

  We took to the lake

  in small boats.

  The once-in-a-lifetime flood

  was approaching on dainty, centipede legs.

  Something about the gestalt

  told me not to release this comment to the wire services

  before the various motivations were rehashed.

  This was the next day.

  Only a few empty cans met the gaze.

  “Sprinkle it!” the children advised.

  “Oil quickly becomes rancid.”

  Matter of taste, he thought.

  Or matter of boobs.

  Sometimes an old woman is coming to get you

  through the boughs that were her home.

  It’s enough if the summer night light

  can chasten, the tree-barbs sustain you

  on their perjured breath.

  There’s no returning to haggle,

  then. The sea is like pale green linoleum

  and all the grenadiers have returned to Sicily.

  Detraining, one thinks: This house was always haunted

  by porcupines, which is as it should be.

  Waiting for people to get down to business,

  put their cards on the table, can be such a random act, like a minuet

  of gnats against a blistered sky.

  That is something to stare at: neither squat,

  nor a tenement. A block of some often-penetrated material,

  a liquid of another density, crawling along like honey

  to greet its forebears—

  better to leave ribbons of sand behind.

  The journey becomes you, but is its way of becoming,

  valid until the gold pinprick

  comes to a head further along further night?

  Shall we embark tomorrow,

  when a favorable wind rustles the sheets?

  Reverie and Caprice

  It seems very unlikely that my wishes will

  be accomplished “in the name of the Lord.”

  Couldn’t He have foreseen this? What is this?

  Tragic mealtime preparations

  beneath a paper-bag colored sun that wants

  to cast no light. And pockets

  or strips of difference, fresh from the paper shredder.

  How much cleaner would it be now,

  O my works, if to be left alone

  had been the original thrust, not this

  woven screen, like wicker or billowing fabric,

  tense but loosely dwelling

  in the hostile night from which we took directions.

  And after we climbed

  a certain distance it was only a boy

  in a suit with his bird. Unidentified youths

  set off after him and were never seen again.

  The banyan tree loomed large, and nothing came of it,

  only a preposterous jelly made of shards

  of boiled facts and unkept promises. Promises

  that were never intended to be kept—she had a saying:

  “Never stay in the pantry

  while the mill is operating.” Pure, putrescent poetry.

  All along you were trying to make me give up the other.

  Safe Conduct

  The coast is clear. Bring me my scallop shell of quiet,

  my spear of burning gold. I am definitely setting out tonight,

  unless someone calls, to immerse myself in the Great Lore,

  which I should have been doing all along. Never mind,

  it can wait, it’s been around long enough. I am afraid

  it might involve cutting a swath through the fruited jungle.

  That was the other thing about him: how many times

  he avoided using the word “eclipse.” It was as though

  he bore his personal darkness with him, furled

  like an umbrella, but ready to snap to attention

  at the fall of a wombat’s tear. It would be sufficient

  to engulf us for centuries, thanks. The innocence

  of his position, as laid out by him, before God and the elders,

  drew delighted applause from the sparse crowd at the racetrack.

  “And if we come home with you tonight,” one beribboned lady caroled,

  “will you tell us about Midas and the seltzer bottle? Pretty please?”

  I am annoyed before each investigation

  that will definitively clear my name. A toad watches me

  from a lily pad, its lidded eyes plunged in despair.

  “Was it for this I tamed you, brought you up from mere pollywog

  to outstanding frog prince? Alas, the mists

  that gather now are of the old kind, from the Iron Age,

  and every instrument you practiced then

  is being fine-tuned for tonight’s one-person recital.”

  Salon de Thé

  Some time before you wore that belt

  on a bo
at, with a tree branch covering half the Caucasus,

  I asked if she knew the Caucasian Sketches

  of Ippolitov-Ivanov—“It’s like looking at a distant aviary.”

  Yes, and the chords are like bullets

  that can reach halfway to Siberia.

  Very committed they are, and faithful

  to their idea of the troops.

  The troops need no notion

  but a path through the rocks always helps,

  like dessert and laundry. Oh, if you were going to change your shirt,

  but I like this one. It’s time to buy a new one.

  Does my lemon-zest-patterned tie please you? Oh, I implore you,

  no talking on the phone after 9 p.m.

  Then the ladies got busy,

  hung rugs on the metal clothesline and walloped them,

  a good afternoon. Your sister was waiting on the shore

  to tell me it was time to get to my job as busboy

  at the Cloak and Dagger Tearoom. Makes me squeamish

  just to imagine it. And it was a hard time,

  but in summer, at least, you could dress cheaply

  and look just like the rich kids

  in their darkened limos.

  I’ll hear no more about it.

  The bank messenger wants Fuzzy to stay away from me,

  and all along I thought we were playing for apples,

  but the reward money came as gourds, plastic-colored ones.

  The kittens showed some restraint

  and the shade was lowered as it is every Doomsday.

  See How You Like My Shoes

  Two twisted dry turds on the sidewalk;

  the weather one’s gray dropcloth.

  What town is this?

  The weather has a choke hold on foreseeing

  what happens to it.

  Heck there is nothing but the alike

  except persons are not. Things are

  like institutions. Stumbling from perjured

  personhood, all seem alike

  but the fugitive person has got things

  his sisters (in Olympic

  statehood) haven’t got: to mimic

  two legs like a dog is out

  and times three sheet music in the door

  is to planting. They really resist,

  soaringly. The salesman head

  is two whole shoes, and that be

  the graveyard by the flame talking,

  earnest ouch spelled by night.

  The great symphony fell down before it could be revived.

  On this oceloted tree they still think and wonder

  how the person caved in

  yet remained so spick-and-span a presence

  all during the end-of-century doldrums

  someone forgot in the telling.

  They was many of same left out.

  Many felt left out

  their beat repealing to the besotted orbs

  left out in the rain. Yet I am this person,

  you. I like to titter.

  Sleepers Awake

  Cervantes was asleep when he wrote Don Quixote.

  Joyce slept during the Wandering Rocks section of Ulysses.

  Homer nodded and occasionally slept during the greater part of the Iliad; he was awake however when he wrote the Odyssey.

  Proust snored his way through The Captive, as have legions of his readers after him.

  Melville was asleep at the wheel for much of Moby Dick.

  Fitzgerald slept through Tender Is the Night, which is perhaps not so surprising,

  but the fact that Mann slumbered on the very slopes of The Magic Mountain is quite extraordinary—that he wrote it, even more so.

  Kafka, of course, never slept, even while not writing or on bank holidays.

  No one knows too much about George Eliot’s writing habits—my guess is she would sleep a few minutes, wake up and write something, then pop back to sleep again.

  Lew Wallace’s forty winks came, incredibly, during the chariot race in Ben Hur.

  Emily Dickinson slept on her cold, narrow bed in Amherst.

  When she awoke there would be a new poem inscribed by Jack Frost on the windowpane; outside, glass foliage chimed.

  Good old Walt snored as he wrote and, like so many of us, insisted he didn’t.

  Maugham snored on the Riviera.

  Agatha Christie slept daintily, as a woman sleeps, which is why her novels are like tea sandwiches—artistic, for the most part.

  I sleep when I cannot avoid it; my writing and sleeping are constantly improving.

  I have other things to say, but shall not detain you much.

  Never go out in a boat with an author—they cannot tell when they are over water.

  Birds make poor role models.

  A philosopher should be shown the door, but don’t, under any circumstances, try it.

  Slaves make good servants.

  Brushing the teeth may not always improve the appearance.

  Store clean rags in old pillow cases.

  Feed a dog only when he barks.

  Flush tea leaves down the toilet, coffee grounds down the sink.

  Beware of anonymous letters—you may have written them, in a word-less implosion of sleep.

  Something Too Chinese

  for me now.

  And I thought how strange, one is always

  crying after this and that,

  against all odds.

  As in the sex game, shimmering

  like a peach—the impératrice

  measures your guns, the townspeople

  shuffle around, the one who will be the hero

  is still viper-thin, and green

  as hope. We all need a change of scene,

  she said, a change of air—

  try the sea. It is good for some persons.

  A closet works best for me

  with a view of an abandoned apple tree,

  a wedge of porch. Here, take these—

  running with the hare, I’ll be back instanter,

  before you can observe you, wipe the grime

  and tears from the mirrored clock

  over and against time.

  These are mere cavils.

  Swaying, the Apt Traveler Exited My House

  It’s so easy to be attractive when

  you’re young, even if not particularly favored by nature,

  even if nerdy, spotted, and pacific,

  even in the wrong clothes, rumpled with anxiety

  like a maze, even if without interests

  from the wrong side of the street.

  Standing with one’s bother,

  wiping off the strictures of dark, demented doubt,

  one believes what one lives in.

  The air freshens the rooms.

  I float from the dormer down

  to the brick path darkened by the lawn sprinkler.

  It seems I was inside once.

  Oh I’m careless to tell the advantage of that pact

  with truth I made as I undress.

  The truth is it would have gotten to me

  after five or six seasons of that sort of thing.

  But it wasn’t to be. Baby blushed anew at the air’s demands,

  and the pine tree fell over on the back porch, causing it to cave in.

  That wasn’t in my list of grievances though.

  In fact there was never any list;

  I coped by coping, living out life shred by shred

  until a magma caught up with me. In the broken alley

  one passed strollers and people pushing them. One comet caught my eye

  but it was too late, too late to praise she always says.

  My pants were wet

  and someone is coming up the road, some zombie

  or other.

  This tune I never asked for

  is a different one, a furious clarion

  shrilling a hornet’s nest of replies.

  The others will be older, othe
r rapists

  than the ones that were put down.

  It would be time to plan an escape.

  This is difficult in a hotel.

  There are bands of bullies waiting to frisk

  you, and on the esplanade the scenario doesn’t get much better:

  Even the little girl with the balloon is planning to annex half of Western civilization,

  and the ticket-of-leave man has his eye on the colored bastions

  we plummet over, seeking release in the sea, the sea!

  Two dolphins like two colons in a sentence

  are rinsing me now,

  pouring me out from myself.

  I feel as though I’ll never be big enough

  to efface scars as an adult ideally should—

  wait, though! I’m coming to the corner where

  pockets of jasmine and lavender inhale—

  Be my scope limited, it’s something

  just to have been in the intimacy of all the stories

  down the stairway to where it ends, to have worn

  linen and passed as a man in suits.

  I’ll tell that one too

  though you don’t want to hear it,

  though it’s as old as the hills,

  though displeasure is now rage, I’ll canvass

  for funds for it, not giving up,

  not showing myself up this time,

  too close to Mother and the difficult calm,

  to the overextended fruit of this day,

  this dream.

  Taxi in the Glen

  You throw matches on the floor.

  I collect antique lard cans.

  “You know, some day there’ll be an interest

  in these, though it will peak, like the tide,

  in infinite relief, and be back next day.

  But somebody will surely remember them—

  the succinct red of that metal.

  Then we drink everything in, avidly,

  yet we are not thirsty. Some mechanism declines

  our auroras, and so must it even be

  until the day of waking up and not finding out.

  I’ll be a spruce-god by then, but you, you

  should still be savoring the advantages

  of belated puberty.”

  And I’ll dress you in grass

  and sing to you, a song where the words are the music

  and the music has no point. Let me chafe your nipple, I …

  And time will be happy. Quiet, runt.

  The world’s most astonishing plant couldn’t