by John Ashbery
One abstracted his gold hair
picked up a cushion and said
And how is it with you back where you are now?
How many worms to a dozen
How long how many of the others cheat seeing
elbows at this windowsill serious as bunting
on a cloudy day
Which of the antique manners has changed?
For as yet morning is a long way off
Puckered mists trash the hill ecstatic as lozenges
LIKE AMERICA
People are buying store-dolls.
I wonder if that’s forbidden too.
Does it mean one isn’t to lead one’s life?
Today, a day that makes very little sense,
like America,
in clear disarray
everything’s getting worse.
Besides, who are we not to endorse it?
And these shattered ornaments to truth
almost grew up to me.
The sun and the yard
paused over a thousand times,
unable to explain the arch that is daylight.
And the tribes that were before
this panicked band announced it was quitting
saw the crocuses too. They were purple and awful.
It’s almost leaking to say it.
But how much longer could I go on not missing the point?
NEW CONSTRUCTIONS
Boy I can remember when February
gave out and it was all “no quarter”—the sect of the
levellers passed over and was as night and fire
and more peace. He returned in an hour.
Perpetually flummoxed doorkeepers trying to kill
the men who did the migration proceedings
on the evening news
were backed up all the way to the Arctic Circle.
The aunts were out in zones
of cozy brilliance I
noticed with teapots to their names
like birthing, and they could do Finland then.
It was a kind of parenting. I notice they
doubled our salaries. It was all over
by 6 p.m.
Many causes later he came
in and hurt himself. I
saw a lot of cherry bombs. Is this the place
where one foregathers?
If so, what are all the urchins doing?
Oh she warned it’s just to the end of the block
where knee-high tulips pucker and all is reassuring
as they’d rather not have you believe. Does
that clear everything up? Well I think so well I
would like to see the proof of the invitation:
a hand print. I’m so sorry these are inexcusable.
I’ll dust myself up, or off;
meanwhile in the clearing they are pouring something.
Do you think you could be kind to come in
and matter where the horse esteems mechanized shortcuts?
Say rather he came in and hurt himself,
and now the bagpipers have nothing left to mourn,
the day just wheezes and goes down a funnel
counterclockwise. It was all just a fit
to have made you start bolt upright
on the steppe terns parted from
with little glovelike cries
awaiting the refrigerator that was to have us all
on its digital menu.
Wait, there are extenuating circumstances
and I myself am just a bum;
whatever came in with the weather
and dematerialized in the corners of the room, just so
am I to myself and others around.
But how do you justify
the crank silhouetted against the sky?
That’s just it, I don’t; it is all leftovers
and why am I crying
when the boats pass
in the narrow ship channel
with corduroy undies for all the years
I took off from Mrs. Bacon’s
and the way they came flooding back at me
like complaints in a gyroscope
or an armillary of vexations.
Then she proposed take this needle
and thread it for the two
messages you have missed.
I’ll not start another reptile war;
I look to the end of the komodo dragons thundering overhead.
Otherwise I sleep under the eaves; the cabbages
keep me company at evening, and are all
the society anyone wants. And Yes,
I keep up the sewing, the round robin
of Lettergate wherever a spare postal employer
taxes us with unlived puns: There
do we stop and pitch camp,
and I’ll tell you it’s not going to get easier,
only harder.
With that they
took off, just a bundle
of stems to make a totem with.
I sit on the site over and over,
let it absorb hard doing,
piecemeal reconciliations, laundry
marks rubbed out in the wash, seasonal
hares and conviviality and the rest,
the rest.
WHITEOUT
More and more obviously, the trainer won’t handle things
his way, or ours—beats me how cute everything used to be.
We stood poised in a circle, and
some note of admiration bloomed and faded.
The cow was coming to ask our forgiveness
for the blue flax. Then everybody segued into a canon,
more ships were lost, more men at sea, the carload of opals
bringing bad luck from Anatolia. And in a wash,
it was gone. No more having to pick up one’s room,
one’s socks.
Luckily there is an umpire who sees that
behavior is coded, that it all shakes down into the mesh
where the train never minded, that there is still fun out on the horizon.
The blues—did we mention that?
And the energy that was coming to unsex all but the lifeless on Mars,
the initiated, grasping at handlebars.
A FRENCH STAMP
Of handedness and the Brothers Handedness,
too often that tale had been told by Yore,
fifth-century scribe. He liked inking in details.
If one is a cigarette lighter
that’s lonely, which is lonely. Or a tricycle
coasting in gales, there is a secret satisfaction
fins emulate. Here, keep my scalp,
I’m seeing a pattern here, divestiture of some knave.
It was likely to be our last onus, this plaid scarecrow
out of a Braille encyclopedia. Hurry with the milk,
be here. Fortune placed tots in escrow. Good to monitor ’em,
go with the feed. In Manhattan merely
two minutes to two, moonlit torso returns. Sheesh.
Some abbey’s got him. Let Fido lick
last year’s olive branch. I’m outta here.
I told you, no way, it’s dorsal.
ONE MAN’S POEM
John came into town at night
and the clock was striking.
The damn boat leaked. Well, I …
It was pretty unusual.
Never mind, hand me that eyesore.
He came to see a tailor.
More about it I do not know
out on the canal.
The twins schlepped raisins and plums,
my dogbeat, for as far as we forgotten
come together to make sense
by midnight’s shattered drum.
There was more walking around and talking.
Then all got into a car and drove away.
Its tail was silver red, and a
banjo stood on end in the car.
The waves of freshman and sophomore g
rief
slide by me somehow.
We are old and dated
and cannot of our lives make any sense.
It was in the way he put it to me,
muddied or on a rock
at the center of a field puts us to shame.
There is more than the spirit jabs,
under the little hollow birds creep
and are asked forgiveness. Some are afraid
that they will fly away.
By morning all is shot to hell.
THE PATHETIC FALLACY
A cautionary mister,
The thaumaturge poked holes in my trope.
I said what are you doing that for.
His theorem wasn’t too complicated,
just complicated enough. In brief,
this was it. The governor should peel
no more shadow apples, and about teatime
it was as if the lemon of Descartes
had risen to full prominence on the opulent skyline.
There were children in drawers, and others trying to shovel them out.
In a word, shopping had never been so tenuous,
but it seems we had let the cat out of the bag, in spurts.
Often, from that balcony
I’d interrogate the jutting profile of night
for what few psalms or coins it might
in other circumstances have been tempted to shower down
on the feeble heathen oppressor, and my wife.
Always you get the same bedizened answer back.
It was like something else, or it wasn’t,
and if it wasn’t going to be as much, why,
it might as well be less, for all anyone’d care.
And the ditches brought it home dramatically
to the horizon, socked the airport in.
We, we are only mad clouds,
a dauphin’s reach from civilization,
with its perfumed citadels, its quotas. What did that
mean you were going to do to me?
Why, in another land and time we’d be situated, separate
from each other and the ooze of life. But here, within
the palisade of brambles it only comes often enough to what
can be sloughed off quickly, with the least amount of fuss.
For the ebony cage claims its constituents
as all were going away, thankful the affair had ended.
FROM OLD NOTEBOOKS
As rain cobbles itself
together, puts an expectant face
on things, we lived those
greasy times. Sordid
with excess rapture, blue
as a cow’s face. We came out of it pretty well
at the end.
Worth looking up, these tepid old
things
could still jiggle
a thug’s arms, thrum the upholstery’s
lilacs. Warehouses make like
marauding castles in the heat, I am always steep
when being remembered.
Ash on a coed’s face,
this barren step planted in Thieves’ Row, more where
your mother muddled all things. And if it be not,
where is its funnel—pass the luster,
please, something’s abiding: love-in-a-storm,
it says.
MANY COLORS
There is a chastening to it,
a hymnlike hemline.
Hyperbole in another disguise.
Dainty foresters walk through it.
On the splashed polyester walls
a tooth fairy held court. And that was like mud gravy,
a sop to the reigning idées reçues.
It’s all too—
charming.
It makes you want to scream
and hug your neighbor like he was your best friend.
I’m over my head with it.
Suddenly there was a travelling salesman with balls,
like an ant on V-J day.
And easing through the night we felt scoops
of clay like tired ice cream.
Here, here’s your vigil. Now get it out of here. One of us—
Gus the plumber—is entranced.
Of course you could let them come to you
as if you’d asked, and don’t blame it on me
when they get silted up to the snow line.
A master craftsman is coming to stay with you, to save you.
Yes and my horse knew all about this
but wasn’t letting on
until the time you and I got over the fix on his importance he had,
only to discover another’s hip-huggers in the brown dust
under the mailbox.
And we all came quietly.
In what axis I’ve heard you ringing—
there is no time to do that.
This is no time to do that.
The passion police are on your case
and we’ll get back to picking winners anon, at eventide, asunder.
Go blow. Tremble. Decipher. Mix and match.
Maybe. We’ll see.
AUTUMN IN THE LONG AVENUE
I see and hear the wind.
It is unreceived. Clouds flee backwards.
I think myself into a stupor.
Once upon a time everybody was here.
Then the pellets started to go.
They move and move little,
like my brother or childhood,
or a little schoolhouse
near the zoo, boarded up with directions
to some other telltale structure, crusted
with scaffolding like frosting on winter’s cake,
to tell you, go through, go through now,
die and formally die.
Yet autumn stays sequestered
and likes it. In that period
some people still came to visit, with nothing
on their minds, no reason, not even liking you.
A lot of autos stormed the site
of the one pine’s expiration, breathing, asking
for you. Some said you had gone,
but you were hiding under the porch, stung
with remorse. Now this person
comes and says have you seen the shed,
it gives me goose bumps, and I, stuck as always on
which word should be the first, but comes out
in no particular order, volunteer my notes on the
time we sat with woodpeckers on the
various counterpane and had a swig—
when you were, I mean, on the fence,
just inside, talking the way people in dreams
talk to those who are awake, subverting the last
ditch of defense in time for what
takes it away …
The light of late afternoon
chiseled the sea and barracks, but who
was keeping count? There were more tourists
than usual that day, the town seemed to run away from them
as we approached them, wondering what was wrong, what was the matter
with the bland corpses they had come to see name
something we ourselves couldn’t see for being in it
as mute pedestrians moved to adjourn it.
I’ve seen it before, I’ve seen it in the street:
These various resolutions fade in and out,
plaiting a track on the texture of day,
a legacy of distant effort, wispy
and traditional, like dads and moms coming off
the assembly line. But they never get that right.
I just said goodbye.
SNOW
As a fish spoils
in a time of truce, so these galoshes go
hopping over sidewalk and snowbank, not really knowing
to whose destiny we are being summoned
or what happens after that.
As time spoils,
it may have known what it was do
ing
but decided not to do anything about it, so everything is lost,
wrapped in a landfill. It could be caviar
or the New York Daily News.
After all, I come next,
he said, am a cruel object like all the torsos
you unbuttoned all over your previous life, scant in comparison
to this one, and I said, go ahead and quit clowning
if you like that game, but
leave me beside myself,
like a kid next to a lamppost. Okay, what gain
in not replying? What capitalist system do you think this is? Surely
it’s late capitalism, by which I mean not to go
yet and peace undermines
the uproar we all made
about it, and you are positively put on hold
again. I like the mouse in this turmoil, not exactly purring
adroitly, not seeming to conjugate the
avalanche of fear.
Now when Norsemen
(or some substitute) tumble out of the north, sifting
down over our busy, shuttered, dignified street with hints of the Azores,
there’s no untangling the knots we put there before
and paused to identify
as the four winds rushed
in and purified the place of partnerships,
fanning overhead, a-bristle with doodads, chafing at every chime
from every earnest steeple, coughing too much.
The little guy was
impatient, was serious,
every time a blow fell adjured another conspirator,
and so, when it got quite dark we became an outing, another
quilting-bee disaster. And if it tried too far
there was always salt to rub
in wounds to be licked.
WITHIN THE HOUR
The tea is too hot.
The curtain in the window blew around
Rind rotting on brown chairs.
In the valley of bartenders the one-eyed stooge is king.
What I’m doing now is write.
That’s the real stuff.
It doesn’t work!
I got a card from him yesterday I could ask Dick.
What is the fresh approach?
Your mini body coming unto me, unshelled
as peace pavanes no one undertakes,
not without a woofing in the chest-o-ciser,
two strokes and it’s gone.
You owed the fresh kind.
Why yes. Remember
me? Remember me
in any case.
THE DONG WITH THE LUMINOUS NOSE