And the Stars Were Shining

by John Ashbery

  Not death, one of his plenipotentiaries.

  Sea in my regards,

  this life is lit

  with all the sleep it can absorb.

  I used to shuffle a lot. Someday

  with luck, I’ll make it to the newsstand

  and buy some cherries, greet old friends.

  ICE CREAM IN AMERICA

  All of us getting our licks

  and then some: the proud with the small,

  those who fell off the canvas

  and reappeared downstream.

  … always forgets her pills, reverses herself, takes some.

  The hen thinks chicks,

  the man in the moon, profile: a piece

  of the undoctored action.

  We wake up, admire the day,

  let our shoes take us where they will.

  The weather’s glorious:

  a real shine.

  Fill your cap with nuts.

  WORKS ON PAPER I

  Life in Japan is one of the most famous with all these

  chairpeople and night stalls brewing

  around a contradiction,

  but the fowler knows his business takes him elsewhere,

  telephoning, with more time to awake in the crystal pageant

  of perplexed symmetries. Doomed because of it?

  I never get hangovers until late afternoon

  and then it’s like a souvenir, an arrangement.

  An old Dutch taxi takes us down to the sea

  where other passengers are trying to change their reservations,

  but the great flummoxed geodesic dome won’t let them.

  What will he do with it?

  You’re looking at an empire that has lost its clangor.

  You get there by dying.

  I tell particularly a thousand pounds of dust I saw

  interspersed between the benign mountain-shapes

  on the outskirts,

  and how everyone was reasonably free to change. After all,

  we make no effort to distinguish ourselves.

  Those who wish to remain naked are coaxed out of laughter

  with tea and nobody’s nose is to the grindstone

  anymore, I bet, and you can figure out these shivering trees.

  But the owner of the bookstore knew that the flea was blown out of all proportion,

  with September steps to go down in passing

  before the tremendous dogs are unleashed.

  LOCAL TIME

  What can we do,

  except

  clasp, unclasp the hand that never is ours,

  much as it wants to be? Under a gray skylight

  the eclipse burns still, there are lilies, perfection

  arrives, and then the tines

  unearth fewer embers. Can it be time to go?

  Models, when they undress,

  misread the configuration even

  while confessing to no version:

  the heated or the clad. Tight boy,

  you reminded me of dragonflies skulking,

  of aromatic fires peaking,

  and neither of us gets to know the other.

  Next thing you know it’s winter.

  The skylight, now aproned with white,

  is our bare harvest.

  But there is good in reappearing:

  the flames’ roar, beaker of scotch, the old way

  things were probably supposed to be all along anyway.

  WELL, YES, ACTUALLY

  To whom it may concern: Listen up.

  About a year and a half ago a young man was in my office.

  This young man,

  whose name was Michael,

  was the friend of another young man I already knew, Frederick by name.

  Well, the upshot of it was, Michael,

  who had pulled himself up by his bootstraps, wanted

  to know the secret of things already not so secret,

  like: Water, does it seem swollen, or how much does it weigh

  when all the water molecules have been withdrawn,

  and to whom does one address oneself after the correct answers have been passed around?

  I told him, as best I could,

  indeed, as I have told others in the past, that such soft

  mechanisms, such software, can’t be regulated, and if it could,

  no one would want any answers. Well, he just sits there,

  dumb. Then, as the call of the crow renews itself

  across valleys and pastures, in the island at night,

  the answer speaks in him too. Only it can’t, he realizes right away,

  ever be repeated. Or someone would pull nettles in exasperation,

  slapping them all over the place, and then what devil-may-care

  attitudes it pleases you to ration out will be flat as paper,

  flatter than shadows peeled off of pavement. But I digress.

  In this town, near this tree, a school rose proud and tall

  once, and from a distance many were seen going in and out of it

  as the bell sounded the hour from its red, hacienda-like tower.

  And sure, mutts wandered in and out too,

  and radish sellers. Well, one

  man, a rustler to all appearances, wasn’t happy

  with the school and all its appurtenances: desks, faucets,

  blackboard erasers and such. He thought it was a pity

  that some come to learn and enjoy, while others plait

  their tresses idly, in cool shadow, and read no book

  and add no sum, the while the milk sours

  happily, in the shade. And children from out of town would come

  and look down at the others, and they too would fall to quarreling

  until the teacher summons all, and says,

  “Blessed children, my children. I would have it no other way

  but this.” And the man thinks, if that’s what they teach you in school,

  maybe I should go back to school. For I’m a loner, I warrant,

  and loners never learn, though they may know the one thing

  nobody else knows, or, by the same token, needs.

  And a shadow fell across the fields

  of radishes: This was the real, the genuine article,

  and all other speculation had been slightly but sadly displaced.

  And they thought about it. The teacher thinks about it to this day,

  wondering where she went wrong,

  why the prisms no longer irradiate electric colors

  and the Bunsen burners cause no retorts to fume

  and gurgle over, over the long desks that were.

  These are the apples of my crying,

  she says, the ones they never brought me, and I,

  I am too distressed to dream.

  Well, don’t you think Michael and Frederick heard about it

  and were the first to offer their condolences? But first

  they swept all the chalk bits into a neat pile

  and dedicated it to the stranger, and to the teacher they offered

  the product of Pomona’s blissful yearnings,

  who dances alone all day by the sea, inebriated,

  yet loves us as only a modern spirit can.

  And they propped the door open

  with a wedge-shaped piece of wood, so that it stayed open all the time.

  MY GOLD CHAIN

  Under the big Greenaway hat, the Diva,

  diamonds aslant … Heavy trains hiss past, whiffing

  the stench of Petersburg’s canals, and the station

  men’s room thereof. What is it, spring? I can’t

  help being a little European. At times. After all.

  I had no say in the matter.

  He hollered at me later,

  “Be gone, your phantasies, sun-dried hopes

  simmered to a tisane of forgetfulness, forgetfulness

  in May, when everything is beginning, or would be

  if it weren’t
so shy. But check it out next week,

  the meat that bleeds on newsprint

  of the butchers’ scales. But by then you may not need it,

  in which case, why ask me? I’m only a doryman after all …”

  Wind enters the slim curtains.

  It was all right to be like this.

  Nobody ever asked me to be a bridesmaid,

  so maybe I’m a bride? The things you think of telling,

  only you can’t, you know, tell a leaf from a silver

  chewing-gum wrapper. Things we mustn’t know

  but nothing we can’t know. His song’s over, I

  better get ready to go on. Tell your readers

  to write me, I love their questions, only it gets

  so dark sometimes, you just want to stand and shake.

  FOOTFALLS

  O did he see something yesterday?

  I cannot begin to say.

  Something fell

  on the floor.

  A nice danger you have whipped up for us.

  Congratulations, too, on the weather,

  though I know you had nothing to do with that:

  exhilarating, a bit flinty,

  as a lock gets lost in a wash of wind.

  When I’ve already stopped to do things, he

  hasn’t been able to insult you yet. Our love affair,

  like dinnerware, lasted about a year,

  then went away. My car’s still in the rut,

  but who could have foretold these greennesses,

  the girl with the aigrette

  who didn’t barely want to sleep there?

  But when we all came out, the day

  assumed the role of host, did what was necessary.

  Above the architecture were

  tinseled outcroppings, a space in between.

  In short it was marvelous, the young master was mad to have us,

  but until such time as the thorny legal angles

  can be worked out, joy must stay

  imprisoned in the air around us, like humidity.

  Today there were no tassels.

  Funny, I’d gotten used to them,

  and to the bells on your toes.

  There’s a story in that,

  she said. I’ll tell you later.

  Two have already been supportive.

  WEATHER AND TURTLES

  The rain fell with startling regularity.

  Sections of understanding were imposed

  on the lake—a likable but needy reservoir—

  and on that great instrument, the street.

  Okay, but can we have a little luster,

  here, please, a little texture? It’s like a weekly occurrence,

  this laughing at the limbs of people

  who march by you, intent on shopping

  or seeing the world—whatever, so long

  as it has nothing to do with you, frantic dimwit

  on your nightmarish carousel of doubt, who sees

  and yet proclaims, and sees on, but no one

  can stop the demented danse macabre

  ensuing from soda fountains, shoestores, penny arcades

  buried in a stratum of light like cheese.

  It’s the old dumb-show thing now.

  I see, I read, I nap.

  Thankfully the chimaera never came near me,

  relaxing in its cave.

  SOMETIMES IN PLACES

  And patient, exacting

  NO confirmations from those who know him,

  the poet lies down under the vast sky,

  dreaming of the sea. For poetry, he

  now realizes, is cleverer than he.

  So where to go, what to be in?

  For as the robin builds a nest,

  so each day weaves a bower of itself

  to offer to the world. I am standing

  here listening, but no one word proves the truth,

  though several do. And we shall acclimate

  towns, cities, sunsets, to our desire, O

  accidental mandarin, and the purple

  velvet of plenty dominate

  our dreams, for a while, and then we shall

  nod to the post, and be off again.

  Day falls of its own weight.

  And basing your luck on that,

  you too enter the skirmish

  of ghosts and dragons, and so are blessed

  with deafness to the clamor of surviving

  frogs’ catcalls. Forgot your lunch,

  was it? No, I thought you had one.

  No, that was mine.

  WILLIAM BYRD

  With the precision of one who fights, slowly, the shadow of the battering ram of absolute knowledge behind him, in a barrel-vaulted, hallowed space …

  The gnomes’ contumely notwithstanding, it was a red-letter day, really for all concerned, and then the tide poured in. It is fatal to forget this nugget of charm even as one flounders knee-deep in it, smashing at gulls, cries, the wind …

  Art-deco priestesses summon from distinct alcoves brains made for discerning timekeeping ordeals. The little pennants that flutter ominously from the rigging of ships cannot help but evoke a charred red entity, staircase landing for some. Blue is the cobalt at which we point our belts, energetically, soulfully.

  Tied in some neurosis competition, I was happy to see you as a little girl at your birthday party so many years ago, changed, and with a glove for each tear-starred hour of the day. It was graceful then to be back-bending, to half-turn as the obsessed host comes into one’s line of vision, from a nameless spree, polite and indifferent, most indifferent to his politeness and that of others. For we live in a three-channeled creekbed and there are no balloon-offenses leaving from here.

  I thought you had drilled the dendrite of your extra keeping into my forehead by now, flesh the texture of a reed.

  And you know, the skunk family approved it too, including old Grandpa skunk. But which does not take us very far from wars and their canons. The chipped, dried paint managed to signal enthusiasm. There was beginning to be in the world like a low cloud of birds circling. The higher you direct our gaze the less it sees the struggle at your feet, out of which a victor will emerge, and yes the orphans play with us often on the sand until one by one they get adopted. Which is why the angles are all acute ones and it’s colder than the inside of a pocketbook.

  Suddenly, shambling

  she comes up to me, a thing partly of architecture,

  of how it would like to be the basis for all partaking,

  communicating, and is in arrears because of some

  dumb thing over your head. Oh well. The misery of others

  is a sad thing to behold but one must contemplate as well the gathering

  that goes on, in bits, in pits, whatever is exposed at low tide.

  The brief diamond that you dangled … And then all want to come to see, tremendous

  crowds overwhelm the dock, which threatens to collapse under their weight, but

  they want to see, they get to see. At first it’s like some

  phenomenon’s unbirthing, then a cold star, but always an alphabet among whose

  letters are interlaced much affection and dying.

  Hold my stinger as a stranger and I will be presently.

  I haven’t filled out the forms.

  I can see heaths and coasts;

  in them we become magic and empty again.

  ASSERTIVENESS TRAINING

  I like the integrity of what you have to say,

  drama or dream. What is credibility

  without assertiveness, endurance without skepticism?

  And the abrupt thrust of your bearing

  at me under a low-hanging branch.

  What shall any of these do without skeletons

  as ideas? I hear the tango beginning,

  the waltz that is loss. Crossed logs in the chimney …

  Without aggressiveness, hope, I couldn’t conquer any of it.

  There’d be no
piece of it to bring back to you,

  saying, “This is me.” A lie

  among others we’re exposed to. And when the needle finally swung

  it was wrapped in rags, in pitch blackness.

  I escaped from the dream of living

  into a fairy tale with no happy ending, no ending at all,

  only bedtime to live ever after.

  You could climb a fence amid barberries

  and never see the departing smile on the swan’s face.

  Only your need will be redeemed

  when you dwell again among us, much misunderstood.

  For now your glass prayer encases both of us.

  LIKE A SENTENCE

  How little we know,

  and when we know it!

  It was prettily said that “No man

  hath an abundance of cows on the plain, nor shards

  in his cupboard.” Wait! I think I know who said that! It was …

  Never mind, dears, the afternoon

  will fold you up, along with preoccupations

  that now seem so important, until only a child

  running around on a unicycle occupies center stage.

  Then what will you make of walls? And I fear you

  will have to come up with something,

  be it a terraced gambit above the sea

  or gossip overheard in the marketplace.

  For you see, it becomes you to be chastened:

  for the old to envy the young,

  and for youth to fear not getting older,

  where the paths through the elms, the carnivals, begin.

  And it was said of Gyges that his ring

  attracted those who saw him not,

  just as those who wandered through him were aware

  only of a certain stillness, such as precedes an earache,

  while lumberjacks in headbands came down to see what all the fuss was about,

  whether it was something they could be part of

  sans affront to self-esteem.

  And those temple hyenas who had seen enough,

  nostrils aflare, fur backing up in the breeze,

  were no place you could count on,

  having taken a proverbial powder

  as rifle butts received another notch.

  I, meanwhile … I was going to say I had squandered spring

  when summer came along and took it from me

  like a terrier a lady has asked one to hold for a moment