Wakefulness: Poems

by John Ashbery

  who knows what will jump out of it?

  Some other passports were issued. Pilgrims

  with scrip and staffs lined the stairwell and the near reaches of the street

  in the moony swell that always seems to take over there, at a certain point

  when I’m far from you. That’s the message of it all—

  of life, even.

  You say you shied away from every event

  in our small house. Yet at the end it turned sociable;

  there was a breeze in the flags that they noticed

  and one felt like running toward some inescapable doom, just for the fun of it.

  Some were on vacation, a busman’s holiday

  they called it, and would have it no other way. Gradually my hands readjusted

  to the stitchery in the tablecloth. If it was going to be this way, why

  not pass the wine around again. Hoist up your stocking

  to where the emerald stickpin has pierced it, a joy

  for all to see. Say, I suddenly realized I want

  to be you along for the ride. Why not? And the breeze

  is cool.

  You see, in your pharmacopeia of battered notions

  just the right things prevail. A man is his house. Two naked girls

  are in tubetops. Fun to see. A lazy susan spins round again:

  What has it brought you this time?

  Are there going to be summer suckers?

  What’ll be the big surprise?

  Good news. The universe has been challenged again

  by a schoolboy in South Orange. And oh yes,

  long division has come out on top.

  To see you the way you go this way

  is to know the marvelous state of tulips in this our parkway.

  What goes around comes around. The medicine dropper approached the sky.

  This will soon cure that.

  So wonderful you could see us again.

  FLOATINGLY

  Kill the white beaches, the hotel, bugs!

  The crumbs on a table sang this song to insulate themselves,

  but the chickens merely pecked harder. We do, we don’t, we do, we do mean

  to vacuum these crumbs, unless someday an idiot boy

  pass through the wood on his way to the ballpark,

  tossing his cap unassumingly, for what is, in fact, a gesture?

  It is only a gesture. So, sure, morons

  can be on your side of the spleen fence: It’s only gurus

  matter to outsiders, after all, the lame girl said.

  She spoke, and I averred:

  No one who has known this beach can undo the righteousness that begat it

  out of sand, close to a fence.

  By the same token, one needs two tin cans.

  And let the browsers beware, she famously

  ad-libbed, for chickens are like jurists in at least one sense:

  Neither is wanted when the old line undulates,

  shrieking its core across water.

  No saffron impediment to evening’s fine-sanded

  elliptical body,

  for the presence of a mote is always singular.

  Towheaded ideas learn from and are transformed by them.

  We have only too much lettuce, lettuce to give away.

  Our fronds shall not know us

  nor apocryphal lectures train us to eye the side aisles.

  TENEBRAE

  For a little snow you get your asking price:

  the Ace of Wounds, star of tubs, brushfires

  from there to here like an afterthought,

  and this suddenly not all that you willed it to be.

  We marched in different directions.

  Once a week there’s a very big field day.

  Plant two skyscrapers. Then the moat will be less

  unexpected. It’s coming round to you again;

  indeed, it dances. And in this starting to be something

  something disappears, but a shine prevails.

  And they don’t pay attention,

  and they don’t pay attention, that’s all I can say.

  See what the prisoners of war are all about.

  How close are you? Rocks seep into the night

  and the clay gets the attention it deserves.

  We build and build our shadow-pulpit,

  then seize morning when it comes,

  in chirrupy stride: names of the lost ships,

  lasting until today, until nostalgia sets in. We’re home

  in what passes for a city in America (are the streets

  laughing at us?). We can’t drive yet,

  or even walk.

  And one is given the run of the land.

  OUTSIDE MY WINDOW THE JAPANESE…

  Outside my window the Japanese driving range

  shivers in its mesh veils, skinny bride

  of soon-to-be-spring, ravenous, rapturous. Why is it here?

  A puzzle. And what was it doing before, then? An earlier

  puzzle. I like how it wraps itself

  in not-quite wind—

  sure enough,

  the time is up. What else do you have in your hand?

  Open your hand, please. My elder seraph

  just woke up, is banging the coffee-pot lid

  into place. See! the coffee flows

  crazily to its nest, the doldrums are awake,

  jumping up and down on tiptoe, night-blindness ended.

  And from where you stand,

  how many possible equations does it spell out?

  My hair’s just snoring back.

  The coprophagic earth yields another of its

  minute reasons, turns to a quivering mush,

  recovers, staggers to its feet, touches the sky

  with its yardstick, walks back to the place of received,

  enthusiastic entities. Another year … And if we had known last spring

  what the buildings knew then, what defeat, it would have turned to mud

  all the same in us, waved us down the escalator,

  past the counter with free samples of fudge, to where the hostess stands.

  This was never my idea, shards, she says. This

  is where the anonymous donors carved their initials in my book,

  to be a puzzle for jaycees to come, as a nesting-ground

  is to an island. Oh, we’d waddle

  often, there, stepping in and out of the boat

  as though nobody knew what time it was, or cared

  which lid the horizon was. We’d get to know

  each other in time, and till then it was all a camp meeting, hail-

  fellow-well-met, and the barstools

  reflected the ceiling’s gummy polish, to the starboard

  where purple kings sit, and it was too late for today,

  the newspapers had already been printed, telling their tale

  along avenues, husks of driftwood

  washed ashore again and again, speechless, spun out of control.

  What a gorgeous sunset, cigarette case, how tellingly

  the coiled rope is modelled, what perfume

  in that sound of thunder, invisible! And you wonder

  why I came back? Perhaps this will refresh your memory,

  skateboard, roller skates, the binomial theorem picked out in

  brutish, swabbed gasps. All the way to the escape clause

  he kept insisting he’d done nothing wrong, and then—pouf!—it was

  curtains for him and us, excepting these splinters

  of our perpetual remainder, reminder

  of all those days to come, and those others, so far back

  in the mothering past.

  ANY OTHER TIME

  A couple of shivers of attitude

  ago the ship coasted out of sight

  to its life in rain.

  More morbid mongrels munching

  and the news from over there clouds

  the hockey pageant’s despe
rate coda,

  that shakes with the glitter of edges, of the steep

  vocabulary that’s coming …

  All around us fires

  are trained at the center, neatest thing

  that ever happened. I’ll bye-bye you

  in blue

  if it’s the last thing we do.

  So we say: Someone had an urge, a whim,

  and lightning began there. On all

  roads we merely trespass, finding a level,

  store-bought thing. Like buying a grapefruit

  and having it displayed. Yes and we have teas,

  boots for the sore, beds for the weary,

  a whole warehouse full of notions,

  and this. Makes you kinda comfy.

  The less said the more we’ll shut up about it—

  on the cusp, actually.

  Probably Based On A Dream

  Like you’ve done it before—

  Are you working hard? Hello? Mrs. Grizzli?

  Only the happy few know what keeps us

  from ballooning into our strength. And when we try

  to capture wisps from the rocket,

  sinking in the hay, there are those who tell you

  to come again another day,

  that the past is soiled and forgotten. Yet neither

  you nor I know what happens in the thud

  of cannon threatening to take off with the wild ducks

  thunderously, and you, if I’m not

  mistaken, were around here once, once too often

  the landlady tells me. Quick! Where is

  your whoop? How unexpectedly have we arrived? In a brusque mountain

  workshop where tankas are forged, and the truth comes

  unsliced, like bread, the captains and the pageants err and repeat;

  for nothing all along was it?

  But someday, I know, my idol will slip me a pill

  for as long as bunkers repeat themselves. Alyssa?

  Shovel the maps into the diving helmet.

  The press cuttings have come to grief;

  wind slaps the high buildings.

  You too know Kokomo, O unpreceded one.

  THE VILLAGE OF SLEEP

  Why, we must dye it then—

  Would I like to stay here indefinitely?

  We have trees to prune, cryptograms to decode,

  it was all a blind running into the light—

  She couldn’t say the word for “fish.” Nor are his genes undone

  by what oafish submarines remain. Aye, sir,

  Captain Nemo, sir, we’ve spotted the junk

  in the roads up ahead. What! That spasm I created for my own diversion, now

  it’s clearly emerging out of the octopus drool that so long enshrouded it,

  while I, a nether spur to its district railway, am overrun with

  coughing doubt for the duration, yet here I must stand,

  a seeming enigma. Outside, life prattles on merrily,

  like an embroidered towel, and would probably be too weak to object

  if we decided to postpone the picnic until November.

  I hear you; the arches under the embankment

  are part of what I’m all about. I too was weaned from excess

  in some silvery age now lost in a blizzard of envelopes.

  How frostily jingle the harness bells!

  It’s all we can do to keep up with the dunce’s velocipede,

  while in a neutral corner of the quarry

  the same binge of history is conning men’s eyes

  into dogged superstition. So we must make sport of it,

  reel in our catch while yet there’s time, but droplets

  are exploding in the gutter. The gambling ship ferried us away

  past larkspur, past concertinas, and the old name became visible again,

  briefly, on the building’s dusty façade. I

  thought we’d lost you. No,

  I’m still here.

  Do you want to jump out a shy window?

  Little by little one took in the foxes’ keening:

  It’s all right, it’s sober,

  they chortled. This was just a plant,

  it counts only for the next time,

  and we in beach goggles, brilliant suspenders … The party beast

  in me says let’s abandon, cooler heads say dive,

  dive like a frog while famous night is coming on

  like the blistered exterior of a sigh.

  IN MY HEAD

  I walk out over the moors, the hills, the sand valleys.

  My head is listless. The wind is scrubbing the stars.

  Yet I don’t detonate. There is too much land behind me.

  Birds sang it once, then not so much anymore.

  I am striving to be late, and to kiss a fish.

  It would be a greater one who came back

  to the ghost frontier.

  She wrote on this.

  They all taste pretty much the same,

  cut flowers, as I was semen in someone’s mouth, an avalanche of whorls.

  What next for me? Not to be the first one there.

  And the wind rattles its scarecrow bones in the living

  room, the spring came apart in disorder,

  all over the rug. The landsman, he must care,

  came too, the others joying his renewal, his removal

  as in an old dump truck on the fortieth mile of the road.

  Seafaring, the faring, and pickling,

  so many admonitions to the Great Lout

  who watches over us. He must have approved. In the dimness …

  THE SPACIOUS FIRMAMENT

  Say that this is a street therefore people walk down it.

  I stand holding a bunch of keys,

  burn up my motto, read Kleist in November.

  Can it be that I cannibalize others’ lives,

  the lives of others’ words?

  Or am I simply going back to where I came from,

  not too long ago, to excuse whoever took my place

  when I was gone? Sudden indecision,

  dear reddish flowers—I am about a comma in space.

  I neither go nor return unfazed.

  In short I am this comedy you wrote for me to star in.

  Yes she waits, time out, time in,

  for me to get the wail, whale of a wail, off my chest.

  Yes the coddling circuits

  that baited

  the time giveaway

  are standing all over me too like foxglove angels,

  drawing in their breath, giving us what we bargained for—

  no crossing, chumps at the end of the market

  where needle soldiers ferreted us out,

  wished us well, taking a piss at a private hall about

  a mile down the road,

  coming in during the week.

  They had put their kilts on first.

  Pull you out of my wool,

  toiling as the will

  bends us to ends and now is no more.

  That force going under,

  it kind of makes it stand out

  and for me too the trees in this room

  we bide our time in, happy as in a nursery,

  till the times dictate otherwise. Oh, he was a grown man,

  scrofulous it’s true, but neither piebald nor land-proud.

  A great equator did him in, the fullness of time

  waited at the end of my hall, cobbled quodlibets,

  procession toward a context. Capitalist

  actions forced it into a runoff.

  Model villages provide all sorts of

  plumbing. Cherry blossoms cascade

  in spring, don’t last long.

  I think we shall be moving to

  the dance baths on the river, river that is ripe,

  right for explication, as you do plaster it with the wasps

  just coming into being, no names yet.

  Twenty years ago my dance profes
sor

  reinterpreted it, we’ll have it on the ground soon

  he said coming back, my hand blotted with crystals, your breath calls.

  No, something to lug up behind the office at noon.

  PROXIMITY

  It was great to see you the other day

  at the carnival. My enchiladas were delicious,

  and I hope that yours were too.

  I wanted to fulfill your dream of me

  in some suitable way. Giving away my new gloves,

  for instance, or putting a box around all that’s wrong with us.

  But these gutta-percha lamps do not whisper on our behalf.

  Now sometimes in the evenings, I am lonely

  with dread. A rambunctious wind fills the pine

  at my doorstep, the woodbine is enchanted,

  and I must be off before the clock strikes

  whatever hour it is intent on.

  Do not leave me in this wilderness!

  Or, if you do, pay me to stay behind.

  GOING AWAY ANY TIME SOON

  I’ll see you in my dreams she said

  then they let the gate down

  unplugged the coffee

  It was time for my annual cure at Wiesbaden

  What good are rules anyway

  They apply only to themselves and other rules

  This rule rules out this other one

  The rule of glass, sleek and dark

  was poring over my auto-autobiography

  like an intensely private person

  with hazelnut eyes

  When it came time to invent, invest someone or something

  you look to the urgent fallen petals

  each imbibing its share of life’s mystery

  as a cat sips and turns away and sips some more

  Little mystery are you good for anything?

  No she says I came out in time for school

  then went back inside to resist sleep

  that is still coming as all my absent years are coming

  The slower time speaks the less majestic its tower

  the fewer bats warbling to interrupt

  whatever domestic tasks we believe we have set ourselves

  in a truth that is mostly underground

  The settled rhythm revives ancient purposes

  What did I think going out

  and never a tiny random note creeps back in

  but all alone a star weeps, watches in the drizzle

  and the four magicians fell down.

  One took a train to Pennsylvania.