And the Stars Were Shining

by John Ashbery

  And the Stars Were Shining

  Poems

  John Ashbery

  FOR ANNE DUNN

  Contents

  Publisher’s Note

  TOKEN RESISTANCE

  SPRING CRIES

  THE MANDRILL ON THE TURNPIKE

  ABOUT TO MOVE

  GHOST RIDERS OF THE MOON

  THE LOVE SCENES

  JUST WHAT’S THERE

  TITLE SEARCH

  FREE NAIL POLISH

  TILL THE BUS STARTS

  THE RIDICULOUS TRANSLATOR’S HOPES

  THE STORY OF NEXT WEEK

  A HUNDRED ALBUMS

  A WALTZ DREAM

  FALLS TO THE FLOOR, COMES TO THE DOOR

  THE LOUNGE

  THE IMPROVEMENT

  “THE FAVOR OF A REPLY

  A HELD THING

  STRANGE THINGS HAPPEN AT NIGHT

  WORLD’S END

  ICE CREAM IN AMERICA

  WORKS ON PAPER I

  LOCAL TIME

  WELL, YES, ACTUALLY

  MY GOLD CHAIN

  FOOTFALLS

  WEATHER AND TURTLES

  SOMETIMES IN PLACES

  WILLIAM BYRD

  ASSERTIVENESS TRAINING

  LIKE A SENTENCE

  TWO PIECES

  THE FRIENDLY CITY

  THE DESPERATE HOURS

  THE DECLINE OF THE WEST

  THE ARCHIPELAGO

  GUMMED REINFORCEMENTS

  SPOTLIGHT ON AMERICA

  WHAT DO YOU CALL IT WHEN

  PLEASURE BOATS

  PRETTY QUESTIONS

  PATHLESS WANDERINGS

  ON FIRST LISTENING TO SCHREKER’S DER SCHATZGRÄBER

  DINOSAUR COUNTRY

  LEEWARD

  PARAPH

  NOT PLANNING A TRIP BACK

  MYRTLE

  MAN IN LUREX

  IN THE MEANTIME, DARLING

  JUST FOR STARTERS

  BROMELIADS

  COMMERCIAL BREAK

  SICILIAN BIRD

  MUTT AND JEFF

  COVENTRY

  AND THE STARS WERE SHINING

  About the Author

  Publisher’s Note

  Long before they were ever written down, poems were organized in lines. Since the invention of the printing press, readers have become increasingly conscious of looking at poems, rather than hearing them, but the function of the poetic line remains primarily sonic. Whether a poem is written in meter or in free verse, the lines introduce some kind of pattern into the ongoing syntax of the poem’s sentences; the lines make us experience those sentences differently. Reading a prose poem, we feel the strategic absence of line.

  But precisely because we’ve become so used to looking at poems, the function of line can be hard to describe. As James Longenbach writes in The Art of the Poetic Line, “Line has no identity except in relation to other elements in the poem, especially the syntax of the poem’s sentences. It is not an abstract concept, and its qualities cannot be described generally or schematically. It cannot be associated reliably with the way we speak or breathe. Nor can its function be understood merely from its visual appearance on the page.” Printed books altered our relationship to poetry by allowing us to see the lines more readily. What new challenges do electronic reading devices pose?

  In a printed book, the width of the page and the size of the type are fixed. Usually, because the page is wide enough and the type small enough, a line of poetry fits comfortably on the page: What you see is what you’re supposed to hear as a unit of sound. Sometimes, however, a long line may exceed the width of the page; the line continues, indented just below the beginning of the line. Readers of printed books have become accustomed to this convention, even if it may on some occasions seem ambiguous—particularly when some of the lines of a poem are already indented from the left-hand margin of the page.

  But unlike a printed book, which is stable, an ebook is a shape-shifter. Electronic type may be reflowed across a galaxy of applications and interfaces, across a variety of screens, from phone to tablet to computer. And because the reader of an ebook is empowered to change the size of the type, a poem’s original lineation may seem to be altered in many different ways. As the size of the type increases, the likelihood of any given line running over increases.

  Our typesetting standard for poetry is designed to register that when a line of poetry exceeds the width of the screen, the resulting run-over line should be indented, as it might be in a printed book. Take a look at John Ashbery’s “Disclaimer” as it appears in two different type sizes.

  Each of these versions of the poem has the same number of lines: the number that Ashbery intended. But if you look at the second, third, and fifth lines of the second stanza in the right-hand version of “Disclaimer,” you’ll see the automatic indent; in the fifth line, for instance, the word ahead drops down and is indented. The automatic indent not only makes poems easier to read electronically; it also helps to retain the rhythmic shape of the line—the unit of sound—as the poet intended it. And to preserve the integrity of the line, words are never broken or hyphenated when the line must run over. Reading “Disclaimer” on the screen, you can be sure that the phrase “you pause before the little bridge, sigh, and turn ahead” is a complete line, while the phrase “you pause before the little bridge, sigh, and turn” is not.

  Open Road has adopted an electronic typesetting standard for poetry that ensures the clearest possible marking of both line breaks and stanza breaks, while at the same time handling the built-in function for resizing and reflowing text that all ereading devices possess. The first step is the appropriate semantic markup of the text, in which the formal elements distinguishing a poem, including lines, stanzas, and degrees of indentation, are tagged. Next, a style sheet that reads these tags must be designed, so that the formal elements of the poems are always displayed consistently. For instance, the style sheet reads the tags marking lines that the author himself has indented; should that indented line exceed the character capacity of a screen, the run-over part of the line will be indented further, and all such runovers will look the same. This combination of appropriate coding choices and style sheets makes it easy to display poems with complex indentations, no matter if the lines are metered or free, end-stopped or enjambed.

  Ultimately, there may be no way to account for every single variation in the way in which the lines of a poem are disposed visually on an electronic reading device, just as rare variations may challenge the conventions of the printed page, but with rigorous quality assessment and scrupulous proofreading, nearly every poem can be set electronically in accordance with its author’s intention. And in some regards, electronic typesetting increases our capacity to transcribe a poem accurately: In a printed book, there may be no way to distinguish a stanza break from a page break, but with an ereader, one has only to resize the text in question to discover if a break at the bottom of a page is intentional or accidental.

  Our goal in bringing out poetry in fully reflowable digital editions is to honor the sanctity of line and stanza as meticulously as possible—to allow readers to feel assured that the way the lines appear on the screen is an accurate embodiment of the way the author wants the lines to sound. Ever since poems began to be written down, the manner in which they ought to be written down has seemed equivocal; ambiguities have always resulted. By taking advantage of the technologies available in our time, our goal is to deliver the most satisfying reading experience possible.

  TOKEN RESISTANCE

  As one turns to one in a dream

  smiling like a bell that has just

  stopped tolling, holds out a book,

  and speaks: “All the vulgarity

  of
time, from the Stone Age

  to our present, with its noodle parlors

  and token resistance, is as a life

  to the life that is given you. Wear it,”

  so must one descend from checkered heights

  that are our friends, needlessly

  rehearsing what we will say

  as a common light bathes us,

  a common fiction reverberates as we pass

  to the celebration. Originally

  we weren’t going to leave home. But made bold

  somehow by the rain we put our best foot forward.

  Now it’s years after that. It

  isn’t possible to be young anymore.

  Yet the tree treats me like a brute friend;

  my own shoes have scarred the walk I’ve taken.

  SPRING CRIES

  Our worst fears are realized.

  Then a string of successes, or failures, follows.

  She pleads with us to stay: “Stay,

  just for a minute, can’t you?”

  We are expelled into the dust of our decisions.

  Knowing it would be this way hasn’t

  made any of it easier to understand, or bear.

  May is raving. Its recapitulations

  exhaust the soil. Across the marsh

  some bird misses its mark, walks back, sheepish, cheeping.

  The isthmus is gilded white. People are returning

  to the bight: adult swimmers, all of them.

  THE MANDRILL ON THE TURNPIKE

  It’s an art, knowing who to put with what,

  and then, while expectations drool, make off with the lodestar,

  wrapped in a calico handkerchief, in your back pocket. All right,

  who’s got it? Don’t look at me, I’m

  waiting for my date, she’s already fifteen minutes late.

  Listen, wiseguy—but the next instant, traffic drowns us

  like a field of hay.

  Now it’s no longer so important

  about getting home, finishing the job—

  see, the lodestar had a kind of impact

  for you, but only if you knew about it. Otherwise,

  not to worry, the clock strikes ten, the evening’s off and running.

  Then, while every thing and body are getting sorted out,

  the—well, you know, what I call the subjunctive creeps back in,

  sits up, begs for a vision,

  or a cookie. Meanwhile where’s the bird?

  Probably laying eggs or performing some other natural function. Why,

  am I my brother’s keeper, my brother the spy?

  You and Mrs. Molesworth know more than you’re letting on.

  “I came here from Clapham,

  searching for a whitewashed cottage in which things were dear to me

  many a summer. We had our first innocent

  conversation here, Jack. Just don’t lie to me—

  I hate it when people lie to me. They

  can do anything else to me, really. Well, anything

  within reason, of course.”

  Why it was let for a song, and that seasons ago.

  ABOUT TO MOVE

  And the bellybuttons all danced around

  and the ironing board ambled back to the starting gate

  and meaningless violence flew helplessly overhead

  which was too much for the stair

  Better to get in bed they cry

  since Zeus the evil one has fixed his beady eye on us

  and will never come to help us

  But out of that a red song grew

  in waves overwhelming field and orchard

  Do not go back it said for if there is one less of you

  at the time of counting it will go bad with you

  and even so, many hairy bodies got up and left

  Now if there was one thing that could save the situation

  it was the cow on its little swatch of land

  I give my milk so that others will not dry up

  it said and gladly offer my services to the forces of peace and niceness

  but what really does grow under that tree

  By now it had all become a question of saving face

  Many at the party thought so

  that these were just indifferent conditions

  that had existed before in the past from time to time

  so nobody got to find out about the king of hearts

  said the woman glancing off her shovel The snow continued

  to descend in rows this rubble that is like life infested with death

  only do not go there the time should not be anymore

  I have read many prophetic books and I can tell you

  now to listen and endure

  And first the goat arose and circled halfway around the ilex tree

  and after that

  several gazed from their windows

  to observe the chaos harvesting itself

  laying itself in neat rows before the circled wagons

  and it was then that many left the painted cities

  saying we can remember those colors it is enough

  and we can go back tragically but what would be the point

  and the laconic ones disappeared first

  and the others backtracked and soon all was well enough

  GHOST RIDERS OF THE MOON

  Today I would leave it just as it is.

  The pocket comb—“dirty as a comb,” the French say,

  yet not so dirty, surely not in the spiritual sense

  some intuit; the razor, lying at an angle

  to the erect toothbrush, like an alligator stalking

  a bayadère; the singular effect of all things

  being themselves, that is, stark mad

  with no apologies to the world or the ether,

  and then the crumbling realization that a halt

  has been called. That the stair treads

  conspired in it. That the boiling oil

  hunched above the rim of its vessel, and just sat there.

  That there were no apologies to be made, ever

  again, no alibis for the articles returned to the store,

  just a standoff, placid, eternal. And one can admire

  again the coatings of things, without prejudice

  or innuendo, and the kernels be discreetly

  disposed of—well, spat out. Such

  objects as my endurance picks out

  like a searchlight have gone the extra mile

  too, like schoolchildren, and are seated now

  in attentive rows, waiting trimly for these words to flood

  distraught corners of silences. We collected

  them after all for their unique

  indifference to each other and to the circus

  that houses us all, and for their collectibility—

  that, and their tendency to fall apart.

  THE LOVE SCENES

  After ten years, my lamp

  expired. At first I thought

  there wasn’t going to be any more this.

  In the convenience store of spring

  I met someone who knew someone I loved

  by the dairy case. All ribbons parted

  on a veil of musicks, wherein

  unwitting orangutans gambled for socks,

  and the tasseled enemy was routed.

  Up in one corner a plaid puff of smoke

  warned mere pleasures away. We

  were getting on famously—like

  “houses on fire,” I believe the expression

  is. At midterm I received permission

  to go down to the city. There,

  in shambles and not much else, my love

  waited. It was all too blissful not

  to take in, a grand purgatorial

  romance of kittens in a basket.

  And with that we are asked to be pure,

  to wash our hands of stones and seashells—

  my poster plaste
red everywhere.

  When two people meet, the folds can fall

  where they may. Leaves say it’s OK.

  JUST WHAT’S THERE

  Haven’t you arrived yet?

  A sleepiness of doing dissolved my one

  scruple: I lay on the concrete belvedere section

  belabored by sun.

  Nuts convened in the chancel,

  a posse wheezed by in some oater: Chapter I, etc.

  In the past I was bitten.

  Now I believe.

  Nothing is better than nothing at all.

  Winter. Mice sleep peacefully in their dormers.

  The old wagon gets through;

  the parcel of contraband is noted:

  a brace of ibex horns,

  a scale worshipfully sung at the celesta.

  We know nothing about anything.

  The wind pours through us as through a bag

  of horse chestnuts. Speak.

  The orderly disappeared down the hall.

  For a long time a sound of ferns rallied, then

  nothing, only dumb snapshots of unknown corners

  in strange cities. The tedious process

  of fitting endings to stories.

  Ground review. An obscurantist’s trick.

  Once you’ve wheedled as many as are there

  at a given time, there’s a certainty of dawn

  in the not-much-else-colored sky. A phone booth

  pivots daintily in air. O crawl back to the peach

  ladder. A comic-book racetrack breathes somewhere.

  A pianola was offered:

  astonishment on the third floor.

  The nice whore mended her ways.

  The breathing came fast and thick.

  The ushers will please take their seats.

  TITLE SEARCH

  Voices of Spring. Vienna Bonbons.

  Morning Papers. Visiting Firemen. Mourning Polka.

  Symphonie en ut dièse majeur. Fog-soaked Extremities.

  Agrippa. Agrippine. Nelly and All. The Day

  the Coast Came to Our House.

  Hocus Focus. Unnatural Dreams. The Book of Five-Dollar Poems.

  Oaks and Craters. Robert, a Rhapsody. Cecilia Valdés.

  The Jewish Child. Mandarin Sorcerers. The Reader’s Digest

  Book of Posh Assignations. The Penguin Book of Thwarted Lovers.