Rivers and Mountains

by John Ashbery

  And permit level walks into the gaze of its standing

  Around admiringly, it was then, that it was these

  Moments that were the truth, although each tapered

  Into the distant surrounding night. But

  Wasn’t it their blindness, instead, and wasn’t this

  The fact of being so turned in on each other that

  Neither would ever see his way clear again? It

  Did not stagger the imagination so long as it stayed

  This way, comparable to exclusion from the light of the stars

  That drenched every instant of that being, in an egoistic way,

  As though their round time were only the reverse

  Of some more concealable, vengeful purpose to become known

  Once its result had more or less established

  The look of the horizon. But the condition

  Of those moments of timeless elasticity and blindness

  Was being joined secretly so

  That their paths would cross again and be separated

  Only to join again in a final assumption rising like a shout

  And be endless in the discovery of the declamatory

  Nature of the distance traveled. All this is

  Not without small variations and surprises, yet

  An invisible fountain continually destroys and refreshes the previsions.

  Then is their permanence merely a function of

  The assurance with which it’s understood, assurance

  Which, you might say, goes a long way toward conditioning

  Whatever result? But there was no statement

  At the beginning. There was only a breathless waste,

  A dumb cry shaping everything in projected

  After-effects orphaned by playing the part intended for them,

  Though one must not forget that the nature of this

  Emptiness, these previsions,

  Was that it could only happen here, on this page held

  Too close to be legible, sprouting erasures, except that they

  Ended everything in the transparent sphere of what was

  Intended only a moment ago, spiraling further out, its

  Gesture finally dissolving in the weather.

  It was the long way back out of sadness

  Of that first meeting: a half-triumph, an imaginary feeling

  Which still protected its events and pauses, the way

  A telescope protects its view of distant mountains

  And all they include, the coming and going,

  Moving correctly up to other levels, preparing to spend the night

  There where the tiny figures halt as darkness comes on,

  Beside some loud torrent in an empty yet personal

  Landscape, which has the further advantage of being

  What surrounds without insisting, the very breath so

  Honorably offered, and accepted in the same spirit.

  There was in fact pleasure in those high walls.

  Each moment seemed to bore back into the centuries

  For profit and manners, and an old way of looking that

  Continually shaped those lips into a smile. Or it was

  Like standing at the edge of a harbor early on a summer morning

  With the discreet shadows cast by the water all around

  And a feeling, again, of emptiness, but of richness in the way

  The whole thing is organized, on what a miraculous scale,

  Really what is meant by a human level, with the figures of giants

  Not too much bigger than the men who have come to petition them:

  A moment that gave not only itself, but

  Also the means of keeping it, of not turning to dust

  Or gestures somewhere up ahead

  But of becoming complicated like the torrent

  In new dark passages, tears and laughter which

  Are a sign of life, of distant life in this case.

  And yet, as always happens, there would come a moment when

  Acts no longer sufficed and the calm

  Of this true progression hardened into shreds

  Of another kind of calm, returning to the conclusion, its premises

  Undertaken before any formal agreement had been reached, hence

  A writ that was the shadow of the colossal reason behind all this

  Like a second, rigid body behind the one you know is yours.

  And it was in vain that tears blotted the contract now, because

  It had been freely drawn up and consented to as insurance

  Against the very condition it was now so efficiently

  Seeking to establish. It had reduced that other world,

  The round one of the telescope, to a kind of very fine powder or dust

  So small that space could not remember it.

  Thereafter any signs of feeling were cut short by

  The comfort and security, a certain elegance even,

  Like the fittings of a ship, that are after all

  The most normal things in the world. Yes, perhaps, but the words

  “After all” are important for understanding the almost

  Exaggerated strictness of the condition, and why, in spite of this,

  It seemed the validity of the former continuing was

  Not likely to be reinstated for a long time.

  “After all,” that too might be possible, as indeed

  All kinds of things are possible in the widening angle of

  The day, as it comes to blush with pleasure and increase,

  So that light sinks into itself, becomes dark and heavy

  Like a surface stained with ink: there was something

  Not quite good or correct about the way

  Things were looking recently: hasn’t the point

  Of all this new construction been to provide

  A protected medium for the exchanges each felt of such vital

  Concern, and wasn’t it now giving itself the airs of a palace?

  And yet her hair had never been so long.

  It was a feeling of well-being, if you will, as though a smallest

  Distant impulse had rendered the whole surface ultra-sensitive

  But its fierceness was still acquiescence

  To the nature of this goodness already past

  And it was a kind of sweet acknowledgment of how

  The past is yours, to keep invisible if you wish

  But also to make absurd elaborations with

  And in this way prolong your dance of non-discovery

  In brittle, useless architecture that is nevertheless

  The map of your desires, irreproachable, beyond

  Madness and the toe of approaching night, if only

  You desire to arrange it this way. Your acts

  Are sentinels against this quiet

  Invasion. Long may you prosper, and may your years

  Be the throes of what is even now exhausting itself

  In one last effort to outwit us; it could only be a map

  Of the world: in their defeat such peninsulas as become

  Prolongations of our reluctance to approach, but also

  Fine days on whose memorable successions of events

  We shall be ever afterwards tempted to dwell. I am

  Not speaking of a partially successful attempt to be

  Opposite; anybody at all can read that page, it has only

  To be thrust in front of him. I mean now something much broader,

  The sum total of all the private aspects that can ever

  Become legible in what is outside, as much in the rocks

  And foliage as in the invisible look of the distant

  Ether and in the iron fist that suddenly closes over your own.

  I see myself in this totality, and meanwhile

  I am only a transparent diagram, of manners and

  Private words with the certainty of being about to fall.

  And even this crumb o
f life I also owe to you

  For being so close as to seal out knowledge of that other

  Voluntary life, and so keep its root in darkness until your

  Maturity when your hair will actually be the branches

  Of a tree with the light pouring through them.

  It intensifies echoes in such a way as to

  Form a channel to absorb every correct motion.

  In this way any direction taken was the right one,

  Leading first to you, and through you to

  Myself that is beyond you and which is the same thing as space,

  That is the stammering vehicles that remain unknown,

  Eating the sky in all sincerity because the difference

  Can never be made up: therefore, why not examine the distance?

  It seemed he had been repeating the same stupid phrase

  Over and over throughout his life; meanwhile

  Infant destinies had suavely matured; there was

  To be a meeting or collection of them that very evening.

  He was out of it of course for having lain happily awake

  On the tepid fringes of that field or whatever

  Whose center was beginning to churn darkly, but even more for having

  The progression of minutes by accepting them, as one accepts drops of rain

  As they form a shower, and without worrying about the fine weather that will come after.

  Why shouldn’t all climate and all music be equal

  Without growing? There should be an invariable balance of

  Contentment to hold everything in place, ministering

  To stunted memories, helping them stand alone

  And return into the world, without ever looking back at

  What they might have become, even though in doing so they

  Might just once have been the truth that, invisible,

  Still surrounds us like the air and is the dividing force

  Between our slightest steps and the notes taken on them.

  It is because everything is relative

  That we shall never see in that sphere of pure wisdom and

  Entertainment much more than groping shadows of an incomplete

  Former existence so close it burns like the mouth that

  Closes down over all your effort like the moment

  Of death, but stays, raging and burning the design of

  Its intentions into the house of your brain, until

  You wake up alone, the certainty that it

  Wasn’t a dream your only clue to why the walls

  Are turning on you and why the windows no longer speak

  Of time but are themselves, transparent guardians you

  Invented for what there was to hide. Which has now

  Grown up, or moved away, as a jewel

  Exists when there is no one to look at it, and this

  Existence saps your own. Perhaps you are being kept here

  Only so that somewhere else the peculiar light of someone’s

  Purpose can blaze unexpectedly in the acute

  Angles of the rooms. It is not a question, then,

  Of having not lived in vain. What is meant is that this distant

  Image of you, the way you really are, is the test

  Of how you see yourself, and regardless of whether or not

  You hesitate, it may be assumed that you have won, that this

  Wooden and external representation

  Returns the full echo of what you meant

  With nothing left over, from that circumference now alight

  With ex-possibilities become present fact, and you

  Must wear them like clothing, moving in the shadow of

  Your single and twin existence, waking in intact

  Appreciation of it, while morning is still and before the body

  Is changed by the faces of evening.

  The Skaters

  I

  These decibels

  Are a kind of flagellation, an entity of sound

  Into which being enters, and is apart.

  Their colors on a warm February day

  Make for masses of inertia, and hips

  Prod out of the violet-seeming into a new kind

  Of demand that stumps the absolute because not new

  In the sense of the next one in an infinite series

  But, as it were, pre-existing or pre-seeming in

  Such a way as to contrast funnily with the unexpectedness

  And somehow push us all into perdition.

  Here a scarf flies, there an excited call is heard.

  The answer is that it is novelty

  That guides these swift blades o’er the ice

  Projects into a finer expression (but at the expense

  Of energy) the profile I cannot remember.

  Colors slip away from and chide us. The human mind

  Cannot retain anything except perhaps the dismal two-note theme

  Of some sodden “dump” or lament.

  But the water surface ripples, the whole light changes.

  We children are ashamed of our bodies

  But we laugh and, demanded, talk of sex again

  And all is well. The waves of morning harshness

  Float away like coal-gas into the sky.

  But how much survives? How much of any one of us survives?

  The articles we’d collect—stamps of the colonies

  With greasy cancellation marks, mauve, magenta and chocolate,

  Or funny-looking dogs we’d see in the street, or bright remarks.

  One collects bullets. An Indianapolis, Indiana man collects slingshots of all epochs, and so on.

  Subtracted from our collections, though, these go on a little while, collecting aimlessly. We still support them.

  But so little energy they have! And up the swollen sands

  Staggers the darkness fiend, with the storm fiend close behind him!

  True, melodious tolling does go on in that awful pandemonium,

  Certain resonances are not utterly displeasing to the terrified eardrum.

  Some paroxysms are dinning of tambourine, others suggest piano room or organ loft

  For the most dissonant night charms us, even after death. This, after all, may be happiness: tuba notes awash on the great flood, ruptures of xylophone, violins, limpets, grace-notes, the musical instrument called serpent, viola da gambas, aeolian harps, clavicles, pinball machines, electric drills, que sais-je encore!

  The performance has rapidly reached your ear; silent and tear-stained, in the post-mortem shock, you stand listening, awash

  With memories of hair in particular, part of the welling that is you,

  The gurgling of harp, cymbal, glockenspiel, triangle, temple block, English horn and metronome! And still no presentiment, no feeling of pain before or after.

  The passage sustains, does not give. And you have come far indeed.

  Yet to go from “not interesting” to “old and uninteresting,”

  To be surrounded by friends, though late in life,

  To hear the wings of the spirit, though far. …

  Why do I hurriedly undrown myself to cut you down?

  “I am yesterday,” and my fault is eternal.

  I do not expect constant attendance, knowing myself insufficient for your present demands

  And I have a dim intuition that I am that other “I” with which we began.

  My cheeks as blank walls to your tears and eagerness

  Fondling that other, as though you had let him get away forever.

  The evidence of the visual henceforth replaced

  By the great shadow of trees falling over life.

  A child’s devotion

  To this normal, shapeless entity. …

  Forgotten as the words fly briskly across, each time

  Bringing down meaning as snow from a low sky, or rabbits flushed from a wood.

  How strange that the narrow perspective lines

  Always
seem to meet, although parallel, and that an insane ghost could do this,

  Could make the house seem so much farther in the distance, as

  It seemed to the horse, dragging the sledge of a perspective line.

  Dim banners in the distance, to die. … And nothing put to rights. The pigs in their cages

  And so much snow, but it is to be littered with waste and ashes

  So that cathedrals may grow. Out of this spring builds a tolerable

  Affair of brushwood, the sea is felt behind oak wands, noiselessly pouring.

  Spring with its promise of winter, and the black ivy once again

  On the porch, its yellow perspective bands in place

  And the horse nears them and weeps.

  So much has passed through my mind this morning

  That I can give you but a dim account of it:

  It is already after lunch, the men are returning to their positions around the cement mixer

  And I try to sort out what has happened to me. The bundle of Gerard’s letters,

  And that awful bit of news buried on the back page of yesterday’s paper.

  Then the news of you this morning, in the snow. Sometimes the interval

  Of bad news is so brisk that … And the human brain, with its tray of images

  Seems a sorcerer’s magic lantern, projecting black and orange cellophane shadows

  On the distance of my hand … The very reaction’s puny,

  And when we seek to move around, wondering what our position is now, what the arm of that chair.

  A great wind lifted these cardboard panels

  Horizontal in the air. At once the perspective with the horse

  Disappeared in a bigarrure of squiggly lines. The image with the crocodile in it became no longer apparent.

  Thus a great wind cleanses, as a new ruler

  Edits new laws, sweeping the very breath of the streets

  Into posterior trash. The films have changed—

  The great tides on the scalloped awning have turned dry and blight-colored.

  No wind that does not penetrate a man’s house, into the very bowels of the furnace,

  Scratching in dust a name on the mirror—say, and what about letters,

  The dried grasses, fruits of the winter—gosh! Everything is trash!

  The wind points to the advantages of decay

  At the same time as removing them far from the sight of men.

  The regent of the winds, Aeolus, is a symbol for all earthly potentates

  Since holding this sickening, festering process by which we are cleansed

  Of afterthought.

  A girl slowly descended the line of steps.

  The wind and treason are partners, turning secrets over to the military police.