by John Ashbery
(a cento)
Within a windowed niche of that high hall
I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street
Hard by yon wood, now smiling as in scorn.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks
From camp to camp, through the foul womb of night.
Come, Shepherd, and again renew the quest.
And birds sit brooding in the snow.
Continuous as the stars that shine,
When all men were asleep the snow came flying
Near where the dirty Thames does flow
Through caverns measureless to man,
Where thou shalt see the red-gilled fishes leap
And a lovely Monkey with lollipop paws
Where the remote Bermudas ride.
Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me:
This is the cock that crowed in the morn.
Who’ll be the parson?
Beppo! That beard of yours becomes you not!
A gentle answer did the old Man make:
Farewell, ungrateful traitor,
Bright as a seedsman’s packet
Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles.
Obscurest night involved the sky
And brickdust Moll had screamed through half a street:
“Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
Every night and alle,
The happy highways where I went
To the hills of Chankly Bore!”
Where are you going to, my pretty maid?
These lovers fled away into the storm
And it’s O dear, what can the matter be?
For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple bells they say:
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
On the wide level of a mountain’s head,
Thoughtless as monarch oaks, that shade the plain,
In autumn, on the skirts of Bagley Wood.
A ship is floating in the harbour now,
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!
COME ON, DEAR
It was another era, almost another century,
I was going to say. The saint wept quietly
in her ebony pew. It was the thing to do.
Then garlands of laughter, studded with cloves and lemons,
joined the standing figures with their distant nimbi.
Inexplicably, all was well for a time.
Soon, discordant echoes reined in the heyday:
It was love, after all,
that everybody was talking about
and nobody gave a shit for.
But why am I telling you about all this, who wrote the book,
who stamped his initials in the fairway
for all blokes to see? And if it only came
down to this smidgen, would apes and penguins be any wiser
for all the tunnels of love we shuffled through,
scared by skeletons, by bats, at every turning
of our loose-leafed trajectory through shallow water?
Only when the iodine sunset
bleeds again against red day, will all children
get permission to go out where the grass is short,
where the absent-minded postman leaves earnests of his passing
from this day to the next, where the eaves are clipped
close to the houses. Five days from the last clerestory
your ambiance drained into the pockmarked shutters.
Obviously the jig was up. What’s that? Whose jig? O I can see clear
ahead into the flying; the poor don’t talk much about it,
but her apron is ambrosial with trellised stars,
her stance stares down even the most unquiet,
and on days like this you ride free.
There was such numismatics in his pocket
as only jitterbugs in cyberspace could conjugate
while from fate’s awning the diamond drip descended, bigger
than both of us, big as all outdoors.
GENTLE READER
Abruptly, unassertively, the year starts,
as freeways close and roofs collapse,
and all kinds of incidents give nervure to the map:
a stitch in time, a local hero here,
boys falling in tune with the ageless argument.
So out of the turquoise turmoil a name
implodes like a star, having made its point.
And the seasons, welcome as you know,
are seen packing it in. Maybe add some rust
at a crucial jointure, no? But who am I
to be telling you your business. Next, young and beautiful,
emerging from a door, casting your essence
along the face of today’s precipice, you see “there’s no tomorrow,”
only avatars waiting in the wings, more or less patiently.
This is what it takes for you to do what’s best,
covering all the exits.
Oh, there is a danger there?
Who would have thought it in today’s heat?
But on the other hand, why just be standing
while its morose page rolls over,
an encumbrance to all, not just ourselves?
And when twilight licks appreciatively at the sky,
your answer will be there in the circuitry,
not bypassed. For you to hold,
to genuflect with.
A shadow of a flagon crossed your face:
The cease-fire is improving?
And in this starting to be in something, what had the older
children been doing? Taking lessons still to be paid for,
impinging on what comes next. Comes now.
Soon there is something to be said for everything,
he said, whiplash, whippets; why even my identity
is strange to me now, a curiosity. When someone comes later,
who will I be talking with? The erroneous vision
made no mention of this. Its conquering agenda is complete,
and we, of course, are incomplete, destined to ourselves
and its fitful version of eternity:
the one with chapter titles.
More worldliness to celebrate. And yet, someone
will take it from you, needy thing.
HOMECOMING
Weather drips quietly through the skeins
in my diary. What surly elision is this?
Who faxed the folks news of my homecoming,
even unto the platform number? The majestic parlor car
slides neatly into its berth, the doors fly open,
and it’s Jean and Marcy and all the kids, waving pink plastic pinwheels,
chomping on popcorn. Ngarrrh. You know I adore ceremony,
even while refusing to stand on it, but this, this is too inane.
And the cold anonymity of the station takes over,
reins in the crowds that were sifting to the furthest exits. No one is here.
Now I know why I’ve always hated the tango, yet loved the intimacy
secreted in its curls. And for this to continue, we’ve got to
get together, renew old saws, let old grudges ride …
Later I’m posting this to you.
I just thought of you, you see, as indeed I do
several million times a day. I need your disapproval,
can’t live without your churlish ways.
About the Author
John Ashbery was born in 1927 in Rochester, New York, and grew up on a farm near Lake Ontario. He studied English at Harvard and at Columbia, and along with his friends Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch, he became a leading voice in what came to be called the New York School of poets. Ashbery’s poetry collection Some Trees was selected by W. H. Auden as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize in 1955—the first of over twenty-five critically admired works As
hbery has published in a career spanning more than six decades. His book Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award, and since then Ashbery has been the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a National Humanities Medal, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and a Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other honors.
For years, Ashbery taught creative writing at Brooklyn College and Bard College in New York, working with students and codirecting MFA programs while continuing to write and publish award-winning collections of poetry—all marked by his signature philosophical wit, ardent honesty, and polyphonic explorations of modern language. His most recent book of poems is Quick Question, published in 2012. He lives in New York.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
The author gratefully acknowledges the following publications in which poems in Wakefulness first appeared: Boston Review, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Grand Street, Jacket, London Review of Books, The New Republic, The New Yorker, PN Review, Poetry, Poetry Review, Salt, The Times Literary Supplement, and Yale Review
Copyright © 1998 by John Ashbery
Cover design by Mimi Bark
978-1-4804-5942-7
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