Wakefulness: Poems

by John Ashbery

  I don’t even ask these questions myself.

  Why are the shutters drawn

  over that restaurant?

  The moon’s backwash is like a deeply incised

  hairnet against the stadium.

  Bats drool into the gutter.

  If everybody is so intent on illustrating what they know,

  why is the ant syllabus closed?

  TROPICAL SEX

  Yes, making a point of using it

  makes a point, and otherwise all is but fish scales

  and fish delivery—the clear-eyed blue trough of song

  in whose pit I stumbled. O Lord,

  help me to get over it. That’s better, for a minute

  there I thought I was a goner

  and now I brushed up this interesting world

  of lutanists and lunacy, and afterlife

  not unlike the one we were used to—

  Gosh, it’s so thrilling,

  everyone is so nice,

  one had almost forgotten chiggers existed,

  and bedpans, and dumb ugly coffers

  like the one we lived in.

  But that is only a sign now.

  Be warned. A slight distance.

  Or picture an insect struggling.

  But it’s going to be all right, I tell you.

  We can live in The Heights and conjecture interestingly

  about how life is made, how a man is paid

  after all the contracts and ledgers are signed, blotted

  in the sun. And surely one can stagger then,

  get up and stagger to the nearest public telephone

  and make slurping sounds at an invisible opponent: gone, warned

  away, washed away. This siding came in with a crumpled

  building already on it. Now only frogs can compute

  the earth-sign that led gradually to dementia and panic.

  The storage place is over there. I can see thistles

  out of the corners of my eyes. It must be we are waiting

  on another’s aggression, handmaidens to the very plot

  that would destroy us. We can

  manage a giggle or handshake, but in the end the ink seeps through

  and the person who did this wants very much to believe it,

  has put himself inside us for this purpose. O chilblains,

  weather vanes in the aching March wind,

  did you want this ending? For this to happen

  even as we were sitting all nice inside

  the house, and by its hearth, and the brutal call

  of the scarecrow fell like a hush over everything?

  My friend thinks so—tell her

  the bad news: “up to our ears in debt,” playing a little

  on the tidal lawn, abashed by our failure

  to keep track of the consequences as they happened, and now a little

  girl goes out to the squirrel. Hey, kid,

  can I see your—

  Sorry, time’s up.

  We get to place a small white stone here at the crossroads;

  it can be any one you like. Remember to vote. The clothesline has fallen

  to the enemy somewhere. Yet the awnings are still prim and conspiratorial.

  My chapter met and discussed you. Any number can play, the fleet’s in,

  and with the recyclables, our starched T-shirt.

  THE FRIEND AT MIDNIGHT

  Keeping in mind that all things break,

  the valedictorian urged his future plans on us:

  Don’t give up. It’s too soon. Things break. Yes, they fail

  or they are anchored up ahead, but no one can see that far.

  As he was speaking, the sun set. The grove grew silent. There

  are more of us taking ourselves seriously now than ever,

  one thought. We may never realize about our lives

  till it’s too late, and a man with a dog comes to shoot us.

  I like to think though that everything is its own reward,

  that liars such as we were made to last forever,

  and each morning has a special chime of its own.

  Thus we were pitted against the friend who came at midnight

  and wanted to replace us with a song. We resisted furiously:

  There was too much food on his table, the night was too black,

  while all around us shrinking bands of outsiders

  entered into negotiations with his darkness. It

  seems to omit us, his reasoning, or in the well of time

  we may be overdrawn, and cosmetics come to put a good face on us,

  asking, why this magic wind, so many angles

  against the river’s prism and the burnt blue sky?

  To which one answers, nothing is adrift

  for long. Perhaps we will be overtaken

  even in our happiness, and waves of passion drown us.

  Now, wasn’t that easy? A moment’s breath and everyone

  has gone inside to ponder the matter further.

  Outside, children toboggan endlessly.

  STUNG BY SOMETHING

  but my advice is—be comfortable.

  Wear a smock, with fractals. Be native!

  You’ll find people are more interested in your story,

  and they will, too. Revisit

  the recurrent tragedy of life.

  Make sure it has its priorities straight.

  Then—ziff! Jump off the end of a dock.

  Color a monsoon yours, to do business and pleasure with.

  With Smokey, everywhere seemed like pastime.

  Girls in their girdles wandered up

  amazed—they had never seen so many cheekbones.

  The irises on the dump bloomed surlier that year—

  too many tin cans. But you and I were deriding

  ourselves, therefore it couldn’t be over yet

  and the past never happened here. Pounding

  on his front door, one day or other,

  the jasper eggs somehow knew my name.

  It was all over, in fits. The tree-house

  curtains were drawn, laughter strangely spattered the mist,

  stippled the tenement wiring. Oh it’s been gone

  too long, tragedy again visits the dying shires,

  tells one to hang in, it’s over the top

  with you. Looks like

  we’ve been invited to a party. Treason peppered

  the masts of my little skiff. Help! And then

  an eternity of silence. Bores

  shifted on the upper floors, there are not

  enough spider-crabs, spiders of the sea,

  for this embroidered doormat to clinch the departure bell.

  Surely all’s well—

  we’d have heard about it otherwise. Strangers tell

  this in shifts, for a little pleasure, a brittle hour.

  THE LAST ROMANTIC

  Not to stumble, to get to tell you something simple

  about the way the grass was being waves, how we broke

  the world after we made it. Then it was a thorn-bearing crescent.

  Now you must be funny. Paranoid gigolos and candy,

  lots of it, over the airways, in fact how could you,

  you knew he was coming today. Well, better to squash

  it once and for all. I was a fool for coconuts, I said

  coconuts. Nobody believes me anymore, they think I’ve been

  let out, but I haven’t, I’m still locked up, and lovelorn.

  Pretty please promise me a dish of scrolls.

  After that one nip everything will be nasty and then it will be romantic.

  They pass him with muffin heads down along the winter beach.

  So many characters. They told him there were too many characters

  in your novel, that the plot was still complicated, but still

  they keep coming on, there must have been a leak, wait, it’s not even that,

  there are just too many peopl
e out there. Well I suppose it seems

  so to you, who are not normal, but if you could see

  it all from the outside you’d find how many are glued

  to your coattails, and not too many, never less than enough,

  and that includes children. My stars well I

  never counted on all this being here. No, and neither

  did your daddy, and it’s quiet in the city,

  too quiet, except for the largest vans and convertibles, and these

  are safely filed under “European”—we can let everything go, really,

  and then come back and look at it and pick it up.

  Well it sure was farther the way

  you always insist on taking us, me and one other person, but in

  fine it was not a great distance, only a matter of some blocks

  in one ward of the city. Say, I had a great

  idea and now it’s gone off and become useless.

  So may I someday, sitting at play in my little unknown courtyard.

  So may we all, while cats whine and grapes mature

  and a prickly dust of unknown origin seems to rise upward from the seats.

  SHADOWS IN THE STREET

  She bit the bridge. A photograph can stomach it. I’ll be in

  some time in the middle of July. Now the best time

  of the year is around now, none can gainsay August

  and Mr. Random’s tooth running in the street, he liked to say hi, it was just

  him running, which is a bit awkward. A diagonal lipstick

  chased him across the street. From there on in it was just damn melancholy,

  no anchovies, nothing in particular, nothing to say. If so why, why do it,

  says Peter, who fought hard for the post, fought it and won,

  and why we are here, in the middle of a secondary terrain, mad and absorbed

  by life, by the truth, as always.

  But the nice part

  I was going to say is fenced out. Take to the hills then. There goes

  one petal, the tree is falling apart, zounds I can do almost nothing

  while the hills come and separate us, plant us in tomorrow

  or until the last dish is unearthed.

  Out crept a third one.

  Savannas that have been dangerous, now no one remembered,

  the evil shifting of feet denounced the lady travelling salesman

  to our liposuction expert. A single afternoon cooking at the stove

  and all is more or less gone over, too bad

  the futile Molotov cocktail exploded

  but in any case in another land, with more furniture than we expected.

  So we said, grant us this, it shall be done in another kingdom

  as in the king’s den. Don’t let the roof fall in!

  I was kind of sidelined by the barber pole

  but explained practically about the dark petal, that it was good

  and we were appearing in its time, and shall be heaven, about time, about

  that point. Rockets lifted. Read me. There is no point to all this listless

  hive. He took off in a manner that betokened bats

  when it was over and they came over. It’s time, now, some are good and alone,

  lost up unto the rest. They can go and cancel

  around it’s too moot to be played at. They are, for the rest unsavory,

  thyme in the corral, three jumps from last school

  the patio ignited, sworn to safe-conduct, like bread out of a school

  conducted at last to here.

  THE EARTH-TONE MADONNA

  What were you telling him about,

  and why were veins implanted in the marsh

  where everyone looks? Today

  is the first day of spring, I think.

  Sailing near us on a monocle,

  the spray tapped and jiggled,

  forever like a lifeboat.

  And true some were found perjured

  in cornshocks, there was no meat left that day,

  no edge one could run around on.

  There were peepers in the loose chaos called

  oblivion, and not much else on the table.

  Miss—er—Jones, what is the order of events?

  I think not sir she cabled

  from a vantage point in Toronto where all ships

  and trains have their terminus. And if it’s Wednesday?

  Then man the egrets, the snowplow is coming

  to rest where all of us have our workshoes on

  and it will be a tough call to divide up the rope

  and Saturday.

  There was no hope in the statue

  of the saint, eyeballs collapsed, sloping forward

  like a scythe, and yet we came to know

  how he was doing, and appreciated a chat

  at his knees. Now this was only the fourth time

  any had done so. So we squeegeed

  the happy-face off home plate, and bunches

  of aristocrats all around us applauded

  what came to seem fair, and in time

  were whisked away—the ox in his pumps,

  forgotten for daydreaming, the tangled marl

  of old Sol’s beard. Everything was decimated,

  which was devastating, yet we went on

  living, along the row we had been set down in

  and soon we had reached the end. A conniving quiver

  set compass needles skittering, prize lists

  fairly glittering. And I looked to thee

  to see what a retroactive spouse might be

  yet we got lost somehow in the confusion

  attendant on the formal victory. We were back

  home, in fact, but no one thought to look

  for us there. We were let out to pasture

  in the shade, and six more volumes dovetailed.

  The first part of the novel was now complete,

  a hundred years in the making, yet its style

  seemed chaste, if not downright lackluster, in the best sense,

  as many terriers were starting to run,

  yappingly. If there was a space for us

  in all this fireside, it got debunked. We were kept waiting

  right up until the announced departure,

  and so became part of humanity. Part and parcel, I was going to say.

  In the dim

  eclectic din, beaters waited.

  Let’s handsel it, love, O my love, I said.

  DEAR SIR OR MADAM

  After only a week of taking your pills

  I confess I am seized with a boundless energy:

  My plate fills up even as I scarf vegetable fragments

  from the lucent blue around us. My firmament,

  as I see it, was never this impartial.

  The body’s discomfiture, bodies of moonlit beggars,

  sex in all its strangeness: Everything conspires

  to hide the mess of inner living, raze

  the skyscraper of inching desire.

  Kill the grandchildren, leave a trail

  of paper over the long interesting paths in the wood.

  Transgress. In a word, be other than yourself

  in turning into your love-soaked opposite. Plant

  his parterre with antlers, burping

  statue of when-was-the-last-time-you-saw Eros;

  go get a job in the monument industry.

  THE LAUGHTER OF DEAD MEN

  Candid jeremiads drizzle from his lips,

  the store looks as if it isn’t locked today.

  A gauzy syllabus happens, smoke is stenciled

  on the moss-green highway.

  This is what we invented the suburbs for,

  so we could look back at the lovable dishonest city,

  tears clogging our arteries.

  The nausea and pain we released to float in the sky.

  The dead men are summoning our smiles and indifference.

  We climb the
brilliant ladder toward their appetites,

  homophobes, hermaphrodites, clinging together like socks

  hanging out to dry on a glaring day in winter.

  You could have told me all about that

  but of course preferred not to,

  so fearful of the first-person singular

  and all the singular adventures it implies.

  DISCORDANT DATA

  for Mark Ford

  Still in spring, my coat

  travels with the pack, unbuttoned as they.

  The weather report is useless. So,

  sigh and begin again the letter.

  “This is the first time in weeks

  I’ve had to communicate with you. It all

  falls, in balls of fire. I guess the

  North Dakota landscape doesn’t do much for you. Have you

  no conscience, or conscious, conscious conscience?

  May I remind you that every sentence, everywhere,

  ends with a period? A disclaimer of sorts?”

  He thought we’d gotten to the middle of the grass.

  His glass fire hydrants can have no end.

  Oh it was just an idea;

  there, don’t rail. The posse is coming

  by for drinks, we can skip enslavement today.

  Concentrate, instead, on this day’s canonicity.

  It has to be from somewhere,

  right? Many prisoners have left downtown, the old man

  assents. He was tremendous and bald. Liked a practical joke

  now and again. Look, the white rain is writing on the wall

  of his saloon. Could be he was over the hill,

  we’d assumed, but the flapping in the net’s too

  strong for that. Don’t you agree? Have you

  had any further ideas on the subject? Yes, you

  could well afford to give up a few.

  BOGUS INSPECTIONS

  The things that were in the drawer were dispersed a long time ago.

  Some were wetted by snow. Others were dry but could not refract the light.

  On the harbor’s side a frazzled touch obtained.

  Peace of mind fell through a grating in the sidewalk

  where it lay visible for a few hours

  and then it went away. Anyway, what can I tell you?

  Not the things you want to hear, I suppose.

  Nor can your interest deflect my moodiness. I shovel all the things you want to hear

  into a wheelbarrow and leave it on your front step.

  Perhaps some of it will reflect on me, on you, hell,