And the Stars Were Shining

by John Ashbery

  some old fire, thought extinguished, that now

  blazes in the stove, and in an instant we realize we are free

  to go and return indefinitely. Is that

  what you meant by lasting? Oh, sure,

  hedgerows are in it too, and the doves there and insects

  and treed raccoons that eye one with frank disapproval:

  “You unmitigated disaster, you!” I was pleased to discover

  one could flatten or otherwise compress it, its Tom

  Tiddler’s ground having induced only a subcoma, a place

  where grown men drink screwdrivers and giggle at the melee

  that would certainly have resulted if someone, some prince regent or sheriff,

  hadn’t been in charge, while the long day moped

  and opened the fan of its grievances, harassment

  being the only one that stands out in the blur now, after such distance.

  The steed returned home alone, requiting all previous loves.

  II

  To have been robbed of a downturn

  today, I have drunk some water,

  rollicked in the texture of a late,

  unfinished sonata,

  sinking into snow,

  falling forward in the oratory,

  violent as the wolf’s cue and anything

  you take from that side of the ledger

  only beware of boredom, boredom-as-spell.

  Then, slipping into the gentle jacket of

  my having to know why everybody passes me,

  how I cursed that heir, braided that subway

  of signals seen only from behind,

  the old rug and its mug—all were madness for me,

  yet only dust. And as I undid its much-stitched

  frogs, a near melancholy approached

  from across the lake—little slivers

  of sense unbent, that were right about it all

  in their way, though I unlatched these tears,

  bleached for the occasion.

  The stairs knew

  it was under them, but by the same token couldn’t acknowledge

  the enormous debt lifted from the mountain’s brow.

  And the same foreman, the same teacups jingle still,

  following a localized pattern,

  uncovering what till now has been everyone’s pill.

  III

  The nude thing was taken around

  to various ambassadorial residences.

  And on the day he had come home

  to see her, her in the maze of

  sandwiches some artisan proposed,

  he was like a bee in summer.

  Remember the reflexive mode, the soul

  can live with that, or live behind

  it he said, to no avail. The last

  breasts caught up.

  And in morning like sugar she gave her head

  to the toll-places the mind suggests.

  IV

  “words like so many tiny wheels”

  —JOUBERT

  divide the answer among them

  on the façade of the spinning jenny as it

  approaches improbably,

  a toxic avenger …

  Later amid the hay of reasons

  we sort out a sparse claim.

  Was it to be thirty he dressed her

  in black-and-white checkers of gingham,

  or,

  perforce, did the lad go athirst

  thinking no doubt too late of the spines,

  pelage of mingled hairs and spines,

  when all would have meant protection

  for him from the main highway, the chief.

  A porch

  rattles in the near, clear distance.

  There was never any insistence on a name,

  though we all have one. Funny, isn’t it?

  Yours is Guy. I like “Guy,” “Fanny” too,

  and they grow up and have problems same as us—

  kind of puts us out into the middle of the golf course

  of the universe, where not too much ever happens,

  except growing up, hook by hook,

  year after tethered year.

  And in the basement, that book,

  just another thing to fear.

  V

  The problem

  would have to have had so many other things wrong with it

  to remain remonstrably a problem that we would have had to float,

  it to its bottle of capers, I to my mound of gin,

  for the others to see us and pretend not to notice.

  That would have been the bonanza, the great volcano,

  but as they say in Cheyenne, “Ain’t some weekends no

  more than sister days of the week when it comes to volleyball

  and dimity shrouds,” and aquarelles are for the masses

  to live off of, when food and conversation run out.

  I know because I was a kid with a banana,

  but that’s for eternity only. All other gaps open out

  in the mind of the possessed. I’ll be glad to

  repeat what I said in court, but send

  no lawyers after me, no papier bleu, if you please …

  And the spider shinnied down the thread it was making as it did so,

  curious about what other alarming event could be occupying this same moment,

  and when he got there, well, it was too late. Death

  makes no excuses and, by the same token, exacts none.

  The race

  is to the fit, and it’s a great day for the race,

  the human race, yes, but also the tent race,

  and my husband is as a cored apple to me:

  beautiful, sometimes, and in and out of the dark.

  We cared less for each other

  than any two people on earth, but the point is we cared.

  Don’t tell the scotties we didn’t.

  They wouldn’t believe you anyway—it’s just

  that my mind is full of eyes, days like this.

  VI

  A silly place to have landed,

  I think, but we are here.

  The door to the dressing room is ajar.

  A tremendous fight is going on in there.

  Later, they’ll ask and you’ll say you heard nothing

  out of the ordinary, now, not that day.

  Madame had gone out …

  So bring the scenery with you.

  Midwife to gargoyles, as if all or something

  were appropriate, you circle the time inside you,

  plant an asterisk next to a kiss,

  and it was going to be okay again, and the love

  of which much was made settles closer, is a paw

  against a wrist. Hasn’t finished yet,

  though the bread-and-butter machine continues to churn out

  faxes, each grisette has something different

  about her forehead, is as a poinsettia

  in the breeze of Rockefeller Center. I don’t like

  a glacier telling me to hurry up, the ride down is precipitous.

  Then a smile broke out on the ocean face:

  We had arrived in time for the late lunch.

  The dogs were instructed not to devour us.

  And so much that in the past

  was kept in flavors of ice-cream sodas now jumps

  into one’s path. We’ll have to

  take note of that for tonight’s return trip,

  though silver sleighbells pamper us,

  hint that we’ll get to see the Snow Queen

  after all, at long last, obscuring the fact

  that somebody was running along the courtyard.

  Then the janitor wasn’t screwy, the mickey

  he was to have been slipped was stuck in heavy traffic,

  and all those conversations about carbon dioxide

  were a smokescreen too. How brittle it all was,

  in the way abstractions have, and
yet how

  much it mattered for those children: It was their

  funeral, and they should have had a say in its undoing

  by the lighthouse’s repeated lunges.

  He claimed it was to read Sir Walter Scott by.

  No one ever questions him. That asparagus-like mien

  wasn’t made to encourage dolts and stutterers.

  Yet I think a clue is back here

  behind the sofa, where lost bunnies whimper

  and press together. He had been a seafarer,

  who knew where his last hamburger

  had come from, and whose cursive signature adorned

  the polished bullet. In a little while peace

  would establish itself, welcome foreigners and venture capital,

  and tides rush in to destroy

  what little progress in unleashing the sense of things

  I and my classmates had made. We were still

  at the beginning of the alphabet, chanting things like “Tomes

  will open to disgorge intuiting of our altered dates,

  we stepchildren, who had no place to go, and nowhere

  to be late, and brash breezes

  play with our buoys. Still, a little consideration

  might have helped, at that point.” And time will be as precise

  as a small table with a cordless telephone on it, next to a television.

  VII

  Rummaging through some old poems

  for ideas—surely I must have had some

  once? Some people have an idea a day,

  others millions, still others are condemned

  to spend their life inside an idea, like a

  bubble chamber. And these are probably

  the suspicious ones. Anyway, in poems

  are no ideas. No ideas in things, either—

  her name is Wichita.

  Later with candles coming to the

  celebration, it occurred to me how

  all this helps—if it wasn’t here

  we’d be like lifeguards looking for prey.

  Look, one of them stops me. “Your

  candle, sir?” Dammit, I know there was something

  I was supposed to remember, and now I’m lost.

  “Oh no you’re not, the smile on that big

  bird’s beak should be enough to let you in

  on the secret, and more.” He’s here to help,

  the whole darn nation is, even as

  tidal waves suck at its precipices and high-speed

  dust storms dement its populace. One

  will say he’s seen an anchor in the sky—

  why am I telling you this? It’s just that the light,

  violet, impacted, made a difference

  for a moment

  back there.

  The bug-black German

  heels and back areas, the long tilted

  cloaks for sale, the others—yes,

  they’re still here?

  Something must be done about it

  before it does it itself. You know

  what that will be like. The white tables with their

  roses are so beautiful. It doesn’t matter if the corn is faded.

  VIII

  I’ve never really done this before.

  See, I couldn’t do it. Does this

  make a difference to you, my soul’s

  windshield wiper? See, I can try again.

  Now, try to expose it.

  We’ll look back and it won’t seem

  so long ago. This late in Dec.

  you go from day to night in 32 minutes,

  the peonies ajar—

  That which I polished

  as a child stands up to me.

  A peashooter blows away

  the soldiers.

  I have seldom encountered more libidinousness

  on the road to the tracks. My shanty

  looks okay to me now, I can live with it

  if not in it,

  who had the prescience—the prescience of mind

  to buy a part of New York

  while it was still a logo on someone’s umbrella,

  a rococo convict from the Laocoön tableau.

  Those snakes get worse each season

  the deaf man said

  and he had reason

  on his side, they were strangling his kid

  and goat even as we talked in the parched

  weather that was obscurely damp and white.

  Next swamp we’ll do better,

  tidy up things, the davenport

  that got thrown out, the kerosene lamp

  you wanted for your henhouse. The stoves,

  so many of them. The refrigerator:

  Eskimos really do need them

  to keep their food from freezing

  you said to the teacher, and my eye

  is dry, all the riddles come undone.

  Hot, swift choices

  over the lake in May.

  The old gray mare.

  Violets blossomed loudly

  like a swear word in an empty tank.

  The fish mostly had gone home

  the admiral repeated falling into

  his habitual stammer—whenever he came

  to the words “iron blow” it happened for him,

  poor rich man, who despised the stall tickets

  once he recovered from the rage

  of being within us again.

  And whether it was smoke on a balcony

  or idle laurels that seem to creep

  out of his books in the library

  we were chastened—“by the experience”

  and so went to bed and never read again.

  It was glorious standing up in the various rain

  to keep clear of the teeth but that changed nothing

  fast like a fast game of checkers.

  The kind of cry that can’t be heard

  yet others outside might know of

  soon as the mist was sucked

  up through a tube and the platonic curve

  returned for various dignitaries to perch on

  like members of the Foreign Legion or the French Academy.

  Androgynous truths never shattered anyone’s

  complacency on Broadway even though they use thermal down

  now (I thought it had been outlawed)—

  beckoning though maybe not at you

  as you come to evaluate

  all the leaning together.

  And the store models are free

  for the asking—aye, that’s just it,

  “for the asking.” What isn’t? And who

  can make that chirp

  sound round in the eye of the traveling salesman—

  taller than might have been expected, than Mont Blanc—

  who sees the talisman perishing amid lichees

  while others gape and walk back toward

  Washington Square.

  If I had night I would feed it to you

  but I have something much better—the desire to run

  away for president, with you

  in my back seat. And whether butter

  brings a smell of gas with it or the Beefeaters

  look bloated, all is of some concern to us—

  we didn’t need to be separated before you knit that

  sweater as a plenary indulgence: shimmering

  with only pastel colors like a life lived

  near sunlight exclusively, like a page turner’s

  romance with the page and the soloist.

  It breaks into thunder:

  thought that comes to you,

  a safe haven from the shipping.

  Lo, a low hill welcomes those who wish

  to climb its flanks, to its summit

  just over the near horizon, blue and cream,

  the colors of my navy she said, I’ll bet yours

  are similar too. That was why I had to play

  my gray cape, the lost card
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  no one is ever conscious of having.

  And if we had something for the stew,

  some salt or something, why that could go in too

  as long as land could still be sighted

  to the left, a silver crow’s nest in which all

  lost objects, blue Christmas tree ornaments, arise

  and sing the national anthem of Hungary

  and the river garments come together with a clap

  to shield those who never previously wore them

  and the gold tooth extracted from a brooch

  join in the general clamor

  of do-gooders—the common sort of folk

  all over us like a coat of burrs.

  Once the bear knew he headed back to his cave.

  Winter wasn’t clear yet

  but all the days of the year were tumbling out of its crevices,

  the chic ones and the special-interest ones,

  and those with no name upon them.

  Everything looked slight

  which was all right.

  Then the magician entered his chamber.

  Too bad there are no more willows

  but we’ll satisfy his bent commands anyway,

  have a party in the dark,

  throw love away, go neck in the park,

  fill out each form in sextuplicate—then let the storm

  be not far behind, the old graves and swords

  of winter erupt out of turn. It won’t be bad

  for us. You see, the penguins have stayed away too long,

  ditto the flamingos. I think I can make it all

  come together, but for that

  there must be a modicum of silence.

  Your ear’s just the place for it.

  IX

  New technology approaches the bridge.

  The weir, ah the weir, combing the falls,

  like the beautiful white hair of a princess.

  In the oxidation tank he thinks

  of fish, how strange they can get the oxygen

  they need from the water, and then when it goes blank—

  why, pouf! And you realized the past suffered

  from housemaid’s knee, and that when the present

  came along, why no one would speak up,

  and it just moved in, with pets …

  For the medium future I had thought striped stockings

  and a kind of beard like a haze, seen only

  on certain ancient sun deities who walked

  absorbed in fields, as children groused

  and crocuses sputtered the unbelievable word.

  Right, it’s definitely our situation.

  We can come out of it but not simply leave it.

  It will die of having so many things in it,