Rivers and Mountains

by John Ashbery

  With the kind of rhythm substituting for “meaning.”

  Looked at from this angle the problem of death and survival

  Ages slightly. For the solutions are millionfold, like waves of wild geese returning in spring.

  Scarcely we know where to turn to avoid suffering, I mean

  There are so many places.

  So, coachman-servile, or scullion-slatternly, but each place is taken.

  The lines that draw nearer together are said to “vanish.”

  The point where they meet is their vanishing point.

  Spaces, as they recede, become smaller.

  But another, more urgent question imposes itself—that of poverty.

  How to excuse it to oneself? The wetness and coldness? Dirt and grime?

  Uncomfortable, unsuitable lodgings, with a depressing view?

  The peeled geranium flowering in a rusted tomato can,

  Framed in a sickly ray of sunlight, a tragic chromo?

  A broken mirror nailed up over a chipped enamel basin, whose turgid waters

  Reflect the fly-specked calendar—with ecstatic Dutch girl clasping tulips—

  On the far wall. Hanging from one nail, an old velvet hat with a tattered bit of veiling—last remnant of former finery.

  The bed well made. The whole place scrupulously clean, but cold and damp.

  All this, wedged into a pyramidal ray of light, is my own invention.

  But to return to our tomato can—those spared by the goats

  Can be made into a practical telephone, the two halves being connected by a length of wire.

  You can talk to your friend in the next room, or around corners.

  An American inventor made a fortune with just such a contraption.

  The branches tear at the sky—

  Things too tiny to be remembered in recorded history—the backfiring of a bus

  In a Paris street in 1932, and all the clumsy seductions and amateur paintings done

  Clamber to join in the awakening

  To take a further role in my determination. These clown-shapes

  Filling up the available space for miles, like acres of red and mustard pom-poms

  Dusted with a pollen we call “an air of truth.” Massed mounds

  Of Hades it is true. I propose a general housecleaning

  Of these true and valueless shapes which pester us with their raisons d’être

  Whom no one (that is their weakness) can ever get to like.

  There are moving parts to be got out of order,

  However, in the flame fountain. Add gradually one ounce, by measure, of sulphuric acid

  To five or six ounces of water in an earthenware basin. Add to it, also gradually, about three quarters of an ounce of granulated zinc.

  A rapid production of hydrogen gas will instantly take place. Then add,

  From time to time, a few pieces of phosphorus the size of a pea.

  A multitude of gas bubbles will be produced, which will fire on the surface of the effervescing liquid.

  The whole surface of the liquid will become luminous, and fire balls, with jets of fire,

  Will dart from the bottom, through the fluid with great rapidity and a hissing noise.

  Sure, but a simple shelter from this or other phenomena is easily contrived.

  But how luminous the fountain! Its sparks seem to aspire to reach the sky!

  And so much energy in those bubbles. A wise man could contemplate his face in them

  With impunity, but fools would surely do better not to approach too close

  Because any intense physical activity like that implies danger for the unwary and the uneducated. Great balls of fire!

  In my day we used to make “fire designs,” using a saturated solution of nitrate of potash.

  Then we used to take a smooth stick, and using the solution as ink, draw with it on sheets of white tissue paper.

  Once it was thoroughly dry, the writing would be invisible.

  By means of a spark from a smoldering match ignite the potassium nitrate at any part of the drawing,

  First laying the paper on a plate or tray in a darkened room.

  The fire will smolder along the line of the invisible drawing until the design is complete.

  Meanwhile the fire fountain is still smoldering and welling

  Casting off a hellish stink and wild fumes of pitch

  Acrid as jealousy. And it might be

  That flame writing might be visible right there, in the gaps in the smoke

  Without going through the bother of the solution-writing.

  A word here and there—“promise” or “beware”—you have to go the long way round

  Before you find the entrance to that side is closed.

  The phosphorescent liquid is still heaving and boiling, however.

  And what if this insane activity were itself a kind of drawing

  On April sidewalks, and young trees bursting into timid leaf

  And dogs sniffing hydrants, the fury of spring beginning to back up along their veins?

  Yonder stand a young boy and girl leaning against a bicycle.

  The iron lamppost next to them disappears into the feathery, unborn leaves that suffocate its top.

  A postman is coming up the walk, a letter held in his outstretched hand.

  This is his first day on the new job, and he looks warily around

  Alas not seeing the hideous bulldog bearing down on him like sixty, its hellish eyes fixed on the seat of his pants, jowls a-slaver.

  Nearby a young woman is fixing her stocking. Watching her, a chap with a hat

  Is about to walk into the path of a speeding hackney cabriolet. The line of lampposts

  Marches up the street in strict array, but the lamp-parts

  Are lost in feathery bloom, in which hidden faces can be spotted, for this is a puzzle scene.

  The sky is white, yet full of outlined stars—it must be night,

  Or an early springtime evening, with just a hint of dampness and chill in the air—

  Memory of winter, hint of the autumn to come—

  Yet the lovers congregate anyway, the lights twinkle slowly on.

  Cars move steadily along the street.

  It is a scene worthy of the poet’s pen, yet it is the fire demon

  Who has created it, throwing it up on the dubious surface of a phosphorescent fountain

  For all the world like a poet. But love can appreciate it,

  Use or misuse it for its own ends. Love is stronger than fire.

  The proof of this is that already the heaving, sucking fountain is paling away

  Yet the fire-lines of the lovers remain fixed, as if permanently, on the air of the lab.

  Not for long though. And now they too collapse,

  Giving, as they pass away, the impression of a bluff,

  Its craggy headlands outlined in sparks, its top crowned with a zigzag

  Of grass and shrubs, pebbled beach at the bottom, with flat sea

  Holding a few horizontal lines. Then this vision, too, fades slowly away.

  III

  Now you must shield with your body if necessary (you

  Remind me of some lummox I used to know) the secret your body is.

  Yes, you are a secret and you must NEVER tell it—the vapor

  Of the stars would quickly freeze you to death, like a tear-stiffened handkerchief

  Held in liquid air. No, but this secret is in some way the fuel of

  Your living apart. A hearth fire picked up in the glow of polished

  Wooden furniture and picture frames, something to turn away from and move back to—

  Understand? This is all a part of you and the only part of you.

  Here comes the answer: is it because apples grow

  On the tree, or because it is green? One average day you may never know

  How much is pushed back into the night, nor what may return

  To sulk contentedly, half asleep and half awake
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  By the arm of a chair pointed into

  The painting of the hearth fire, or reach, in a coma,

  Out of the garden for foreign students.

  Be sure the giant would know falling asleep, but the frozen droplets reveal

  A mixed situation in which the penis

  Scored the offer by fixed marches into what is.

  One black spot remained.

  If I should … If I said you were there

  The … towering peace around us might

  Hold up the way it breaks—the monsoon

  Move a pebble, to the plumbing contract, cataract.

  There has got to be only—there is going to be

  An accent on the portable bunch of grapes

  The time the mildewed sea cast the

  Hygrometer too far away. You read into it

  The meaning of tears, survey of our civilization.

  Only one thing exists: the fear of death. As widows are a prey to loan sharks

  And Cape Hatteras to hurricanoes, so man to the fear of dying, to the

  Certainty of falling. And just so it permits him to escape from time to time

  Amid fields of boarded-up posters: “Objects, as they recede, appear to become smaller

  And all horizontal receding lines have their vanishing point upon the line of sight,”

  Which is some comfort after all, for our volition to see must needs condition these phenomena to a certain degree.

  But it would be rash to derive too much confidence from a situation which, in the last analysis, scarcely warrants it.

  What I said first goes: sleep, death and hollyhocks

  And a new twilight stained, perhaps, a slightly unearthlier periwinkle blue,

  But no dramatic arguments for survival, and please no magic justification of results.

  Uh … stupid song … that weather bonnet

  Is all gone now. But the apothecary biscuits dwindled.

  Where a little spectral

  Cliffs, teeming over into irony’s

  Gotten silently inflicted on the passages

  Morning undermines, the daughter is.

  Its oval armor

  Protects it then, and the poisonous filaments hanging down

  Are armor as well, or are they the creature itself, screaming

  To protect itself? An aggressive weapon, as well as a plan of defense?

  Nature is still liable to pull a few fast ones, which is why I can’t emphasize enough

  The importance of adhering to my original program. Remember,

  No hope is to be authorized except in exceptional cases

  To be decided on by me. In the meantime, back to dreaming,

  Your most important activity.

  The most difficult of all is an arrangement of hawthorn leaves

  But the sawing motion of desire, throwing you a moment to one side

  And then the other, will, I think, permit you to forget your dreams for a little while.

  In reality you place too much importance on them. “Frei aber Einsam” (Free but Alone)

  Ought to be your motto. If you dream at all, place a cloth over your face:

  Its expression of satisfied desire might be too much for some spectators.

  The west wind grazes my cheek, the droplets come pattering down;

  What matter now whether I wake or sleep?

  The west wind grazes my cheek, the droplets come pattering down;

  A vast design shows in the meadow’s parched and trampled grasses.

  Actually a game of “fox and geese” has been played there, but the real reality,

  Beyond truer imaginings, is that it is a mystical design full of a certain significance,

  Burning, sealing its way into my consciousness.

  Smooth out the sad flowers, pick up where you left off

  But leave me immersed in dreams of sexual imagery:

  Now that the homecoming geese unfurl in waves on the west wind

  And cock covers hen, the farmhouse dog slavers over his bitch, and horse and mare go screwing through the meadow!

  A pure scream of things arises from these various sights and smells

  As steam from a wet shingle, and I am happy once again

  Walking among these phenomena that seem familiar to me from my earliest childhood.

  The gray wastes of water surround

  My puny little shoal. Sometimes storms roll

  Tremendous billows far up on the gray sand beach, and the morning

  After, odd tusked monsters lie stinking in the sun.

  They are inedible. For food there is only

  Breadfruit, and berries garnered in the jungle’s inner reaches,

  Wrested from scorpion and poisonous snake. Fresh water is a problem.

  After a rain you may find some nestling in the hollow trunk of a tree, or in hollow stones.

  One’s only form of distraction is really

  To climb to the top of the one tall cliff to scan the distances.

  Not for a ship, of course—this island is far from all the trade routes—

  But in hopes of an unusual sight, such as a school of dolphins at play,

  A whale spouting, or a cormorant bearing down on its prey.

  So high this cliff is that the pebble beach far below seems made of gravel.

  Halfway down, the crows and choughs look like bees.

  Near by are the nests of vultures. They cluck sympathetically in my direction,

  Which will not prevent them from rending me limb from limb once I have keeled over definitively.

  Further down, and way over to one side, are eagles;

  Always fussing, fouling their big nests, they always seem to manage to turn their backs to you.

  The glass is low; no doubt we are in for a storm.

  Sure enough: in the pale gray and orange distances to the left, a

  Waterspout is becoming distinctly visible.

  Beautiful, but terrifying;

  Delicate, transparent, like a watercolor by that nineteenth-century Englishman whose name I forget

  (I am beginning to forget everything on this island. If only I had been allowed to bring my ten favorite books with me—

  But a weathered child’s alphabet is my only reading material. Luckily,

  Some of the birds and animals on the island are pictured in it—the albatross, for instance—that’s a name I never would have remembered.)

  It looks as though the storm-fiend were planning to kick up quite a ruckus

  For this evening. I had better be getting back to the tent

  To make sure everything is shipshape, weight down the canvas with extra stones,

  Bank the fire, and prepare myself a little hardtack and tea

  For the evening’s repast. Still, it is rather beautiful up here,

  Watching the oncoming storm. Now the big cloud that was in front of the waterspout

  Seems to be lurching forward, so that the waterspout, behind it, looks more like a three-dimensional photograph.

  Above me, the sky is a luminous silver-gray. Yet rain, like silver porcupine quills, has begun to be thrown down.

  All the lightning is still contained in the big black cloud however. Now thunder claps belch forth from it,

  Causing the startled vultures to fly forth from their nests.

  I really had better be getting back down, I suppose.

  Still it is rather fun to linger on in the wet,

  Letting your clothes get soaked. What difference does it make? No one will scold me for it,

  Or look askance. Supposing I catch cold? It hardly matters, there are no nurses or infirmaries here

  To make an ass of one. A really serious case of pneumonia would suit me fine.

  Ker-choo! There, now I’m being punished for saying so. Aw, what’s the use.

  I really am starting down now. Good-bye, Storm-fiend. Good-bye, vultures.

  In reality of course the middle-class apartment I live in is nothing like a desert island.
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  Cozy and warm it is, with a good library and record collection.

  Yet I feel cut off from the life in the streets.

  Automobiles and trucks plow by, spattering me with filthy slush.

  The man in the street turns his face away. Another island-dweller, no doubt.

  In a store or crowded cafe, you get a momentary impression of warmth:

  Steam pours out of the espresso machine, fogging the panes with their modern lettering

  Of a kind that has only been available for about a year. The headlines offer you

  News that is so new you can’t realize it yet. A revolution in Argentina! Think of it! Bullets flying through the air, men on the move;

  Great passions inciting to massive expenditures of energy, changing the lives of many individuals.

  Yet it is all offered as “today’s news,” as if we somehow had a right to it, as though it were a part of our lives

  That we’d be silly to refuse. Here, have another—crime or revolution? Take your pick.

  None of this makes any difference to professional exiles like me, and that includes everybody in the place.

  We go on sipping our coffee, thinking dark or transparent thoughts …

  Excuse me, may I have the sugar. Why certainly—pardon me for not having passed it to you.

  A lot of bunk, none of them really care whether you get any sugar or not.

  Just try asking for something more complicated and see how far it gets you.

  Not that I care anyway, being an exile. Nope, the motley spectacle offers no charms whatsoever for me—

  And yet—and yet I feel myself caught up in its coils—

  Its defectuous movement is that of my reasoning powers—

  The main point has already changed, but the masses continue to tread the water

  Of backward opinion, living out their mandate as though nothing had happened.

  We step out into the street, not realizing that the street is different,

  And so it shall be all our lives; only, from this moment on, nothing will ever be the same again. Fortunately our small pleasures and the monotony of daily existence

  Are safe. You will wear the same clothes, and your friends will still want to see you for the same reasons—you fill a definite place in their lives, and they would be sorry to see you go.

  There has, however, been this change, so complete as to be invisible:

  You might call it … “passion” might be a good word.

  I think we will call it that for easy reference. This room, now, for instance, is all black and white instead of blue.