John Ashbery

Barely tolerated, living on the margin In our technological society, we were always having to be rescued On the brink of destruction, like heroines in Orlando Furioso Before it was time to start all over again. There would be thunder in the bushes, a rustling of coils, And Angelica, in the Ingres painting, was considering The colorful but small monster near her toe, as though wondering whether forgetting The whole thing might not, in the end, be the only solution. And then there always came a time when Happy Hooligan in his rusted green automobile Came plowing down the course, just to make sure everything was O.K., Only by that time we were in another chapter and confused About how to receive this latest piece of information. Was it information? Weren’t we rather acting this out For someone else’s benefit, thoughts in a mind With room enough and to spare for our little problems (so they began to seem), Our daily quandary about food and the rent and bills to be paid? To reduce all this to a small variant, To step free at last, minuscule on the gigantic plateau— This was our ambition: to be small and clear and free. Alas, the summer’s energy wanes quickly, A moment and it is gone. And no longer May we make the necessary arrangements, simple as they are. Our star was brighter perhaps when it had water in it. Now there is no question even of that, but only Of holding on to the hard earth so as not to get thrown off, With an occasional dream, a vision: a robin flies across The upper corner of the window, you brush your hair away And cannot quite see, or a wound will flash Against the sweet faces of the others, something like: This is what you wanted to hear, so why Did you think of listening to something else? We are all talkers It is true, but underneath the talk lies The moving and not wanting to be moved, the loose Meaning, untidy and simple like a threshing floor. These then were some hazards of the course, Yet though we knew the course was hazards and nothing else It was still a shock when, almost a quarter of a century later, The clarity of the rules dawned on you for the first time. They were the players, and we who had struggled at the game Were merely spectators, though subject to its vicissitudes And moving with it out of the tearful stadium, borne on shoulders, at last. Night after night this message returns, repeated In the flickering bulbs of the sky, raised past us, taken away from us, Yet ours over and over until the end that is past truth, The being of our sentences, in the climate that fostered them, Not ours to own, like a book, but to be with, and sometimes To be without, alone and desperate. But the fantasy makes it ours, a kind of fence-sitting Raised to the level of an esthetic ideal. These were moments, years, Solid with reality, faces, namable events, kisses, heroic acts, But like the friendly beginning of a geometrical progression Not too reassuring, as though meaning could be cast aside some day When it had been outgrown. Better, you said, to stay cowering Like this in the early lessons, since the promise of learning Is a delusion, and I agreed, adding that Tomorrow would alter the sense of what had already been learned, That the learning process is extended in this way, so that from this standpoint None of us ever graduates from college, For time is an emulsion, and probably thinking not to grow up Is the brightest kind of maturity for us, right now at any rate. And you see, both of us were right, though nothing Has somehow come to nothing; the avatars Of our conforming to the rules and living Around the home have made—well, in a sense, “good citizens” of us, Brushing the teeth and all that, and learning to accept The charity of the hard moments as they are doled out, For this is action, this not being sure, this careless Preparing, sowing the seeds crooked in the furrow, Making ready to forget, and always coming back To the mooring of starting out, that day so long ago.

Cervantes was asleep when he wrote Don Quixote. Joyce slept during the Wandering Rocks section of Ulysses. Homer nodded and occasionally slept during the greater part of the Iliad; he was awake however when he wrote the Odyssey. Proust snored his way through The Captive, as have legions of his readers after him. Melville was asleep at the wheel for much of Moby-Dick. Fitzgerald slept through Tender Is the Night, which is perhaps not so surprising, but the fact that Mann slumbered on the very slopes of The Magic Mountain is quite extraordinary—that he wrote it, even more so. Kafka, of course, never slept, even while not writing or on bank holidays. No one knows too much about George Eliot’s writing habits—my guess is she would sleep a few minutes, wake up and write something, then pop back to sleep again. Lew Wallace’s forty winks came, incredibly, during the chariot race in Ben-Hur. Emily Dickinson slept on her cold, narrow bed in Amherst. When she awoke there would be a new poem inscribed by Jack Frost on the windowpane; outside, glass foliage chimed. Good old Walt snored as he wrote and, like so many of us, insisted he didn’t. Maugham snored on the Riviera. Agatha Christie slept daintily, as a woman sleeps, which is why her novels are like tea sandwiches—artistic, for the most part. I sleep when I cannot avoid it; my writing and sleeping are constantly improving. I have other things to say, but shall not detain you much. Never go out in a boat with an author—they cannot tell when they are over water. Birds make poor role models. A philosopher should be shown the door, but don’t, under any circumstances, try it. Slaves make good servants. Brushing the teeth may not always improve the appearance. Store clean rags in old pillow cases. Feed a dog only when he barks. Flush tea leaves down the toilet, coffee grounds down the sink. Beware of anonymous letters—you may have written them, in a wordless implosion of sleep.

I am forced to sleepwalk much of the time. We hold on to these old ways, are troubled sometimes and then the geyser goes away, time gutted. In and of itself there is no great roar, force pitted against force that makes up in time what it loses in speed. The waterfalls, the canyon, a royal I-told-you-so comes back to greet us at the beginning. How was your trip? Oh I didn’t last you see, folded over like the margin of a dream of the thing-in-itself. Well, and what have we come to? A paper-thin past, just so, and ‘tis pity. We regurgitate old anthems and what has come to pass, and why dwell on these. Why make things more difficult than they already are? Because if it’s boring in a different way, that’ll be interesting too. That’s what I say. That rascal, he jumped over the fence. I’m wiping my pince-nez now. Did you ever hear from the one who said he’d be back once it was over, who eluded me even in my sleep? That was a particularly promising time, we thought. Now the sun’s out and it’s raining again. Just like a day from the compendium. I’ll vouch for you, and we can go on scrolling as though nothing had risen, the horizon forest looks back at us. The preacher shook his head, the evangelist balanced two spools at the end of his little makeshift rope. We’d gone too far. We’d have to come back in a day or so.

On the secret map the assassins Cloistered, the Moon River was marked Near the eighteen peaks and the city Of humiliation and defeat—wan ending Of the trail among dry, papery leaves Gray-brown quills like thoughts In the melodious but vast mass of today’s Writing through fields and swamps Marked, on the map, with little bunches of weeds. Certainly squirrels lived in the woods But devastation and dull sleep still Hung over the land, quelled The rioters turned out of sleep in the peace of prisons Singing on marble factory walls Deaf consolation of minor tunes that pack The air with heavy invisible rods Pent in some sand valley from Which only quiet walking ever instructs. The bird flew over and Sat—there was nothing else to do. Do not mistake its silence for pride or strength Or the waterfall for a harbor Full of light boats that is there Performing for thousands of people In clothes some with places to go Or games. Sometimes over the pillar Of square stones its impact Makes a light print. So going around cities To get to other places you found It all on paper but the land Was made of paper processed To look like ferns, mud or other Whose sea unrolled its magic Distances and then rolled them up Its secret was only a pocket After all but some corners are darker Than these moonless nights spent as on a raft In the seclusion of a melody heard As though through trees And you can never ignite their touch Long but there were homes Flung far out near the asperities Of a sharp, rocky pinnacle And other collective places Shadows of vineyards whose wine Tasted of the forest floor Fisheries and oyster beds Tides under the pole Seminaries of instruction, public Places for electric light And the major tax assessment area Wrinkled on the plan Of election to public office Sixty-two years old bath and breakfast The formal traffic, shadows To make it not worth joining After the ox had pulled away the cart. Your plan was to separate the enemy into two groups With the razor-edged mountains between. It worked well on paper But their camp had grown To be the mountains and the map Carefully peeled away and not torn Was the light, a tender but tough bark On everything. Fortunately the war was solved In another way by isolating the two sections Of the enemy’s navy so that the mainland Warded away the big floating ships. Light bounced off the ends Of the small gray waves to tell Them in the observatory About the great drama that was being won To turn off the machinery And quietly move among the rustic landscape Scooping snow off the mountains rinsing The coarser ones that love had Slowly risen in the night to overflow Wetting pillow and petal Determined to place the letter On the unassassinated president’s desk So that a stamp could reproduce all this In detail, down to the last autumn leaf And the affliction of June ride Slowly out into the sun-blackened landscape.

Out here on Cottage Grove it matters. The galloping Wind balks at its shadow. The carriages Are drawn forward under a sky of fumed oak. This is America calling: The mirroring of state to state, Of voice to voice on the wires, The force of colloquial greetings like golden Pollen sinking on the afternoon breeze. In service stairs the sweet corruption thrives; The page of dusk turns like a creaking revolving stage in Warren, Ohio. If this is the way it is let’s leave, They agree, and soon the slow boxcar journey begins, Gradually accelerating until the gyrating fans of suburbs Enfolding the darkness of cities are remembered Only as a recurring tic. And midway We meet the disappointed, returning ones, without its Being able to stop us in the headlong night Toward the nothing of the coast. At Bolinas The houses doze and seem to wonder why through the Pacific haze, and the dreams alternately glow and grow dull. Why be hanging on here? Like kites, circling, Slipping on a ramp of air, but always circling? But the variable cloudiness is pouring it on, Flooding back to you like the meaning of a joke. The land wasn’t immediately appealing; we built it Partly over with fake ruins, in the image of ourselves: An arch that terminates in mid-keystone, a crumbling stone pier For laundresses, an open-air theater, never completed And only partially designed. How are we to inhabit This space from which the fourth wall is invariably missing, As in a stage-set or dollhouse, except by staying as we are, In lost profile, facing the stars, with dozens of as yet Unrealized projects, and a strict sense Of time running out, of evening presenting The tactfully folded-over bill? And we fit Rather too easily into it, become transparent, Almost ghosts. One day The birds and animals in the pasture have absorbed The color, the density of the surroundings, The leaves are alive, and too heavy with life. A long period of adjustment followed. In the cities at the turn of the century they knew about it But were careful not to let on as the iceman and the milkman Disappeared down the block and the postman shouted His daily rounds. The children under the trees knew it But all the fathers returning home On streetcars after a satisfying day at the office undid it: The climate was still floral and all the wallpaper In a million homes all over the land conspired to hide it. One day we thought of painted furniture, of how It just slightly changes everything in the room And in the yard outside, and how, if we were going To be able to write the history of our time, starting with today, It would be necessary to model all these unimportant details So as to be able to include them; otherwise the narrative Would have that flat, sandpapered look the sky gets Out in the middle west toward the end of summer, The look of wanting to back out before the argument Has been resolved, and at the same time to save appearances So that tomorrow will be pure. Therefore, since we have to do our business In spite of things, why not make it in spite of everything? That way, maybe the feeble lakes and swamps Of the back country will get plugged into the circuit And not just the major events but the whole incredible Mass of everything happening simultaneously and pairing off, Channeling itself into history, will unroll As carefully and as casually as a conversation in the next room, And the purity of today will invest us like a breeze, Only be hard, spare, ironical: something one can Tip one’s hat to and still get some use out of. The parade is turning into our street. My stars, the burnished uniforms and prismatic Features of this instant belong here. The land Is pulling away from the magic, glittering coastal towns To an aforementioned rendezvous with August and December. The hunch is it will always be this way, The look, the way things first scared you In the night light, and later turned out to be, Yet still capable, all the same, of a narrow fidelity To what you and they wanted to become: No sighs like Russian music, only a vast unravelling Out toward the junctions and to the darkness beyond To these bare fields, built at today’s expense.

Aggressive panhandling, public urination, verbal threats, public nudity and violation of the open container law followed us down the days, for why are we here much longer, or even this long? I ask you to be civil and not interrupt night’s business. It was fun getting used to you, who couldn’t have been more nicer. This was as modern as it had ever been. They were influenced by him: some dirty magazine on the air tonight. (Amid the chaos, reports of survivors.) Didn’t the flowers’ restoration cat fugue keep spilling, and like that? It wouldn’t be the first time, either. The pro-taffeta get up and laugh, investigate or communicate. The night you were going to stay up late, others will kiss, and he talks about you, and I don’t know what. Come in, anyway, and don’t lack for tales of the Assertion. We’re talking civilian unrest. Yes, well, maybe you should take one. (Do not bite or chew.)

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level. Look at it talking to you. You look out a window Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don’t have it. You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other. The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot. What’s a plain level? It is that and other things, Bringing a system of them into play. Play? Well, actually, yes, but I consider play to be A deeper outside thing, a dreamed role-pattern, As in the division of grace these long August days Without proof. Open-ended. And before you know know / It The line began and ended with the same word when first published in the Times Literary Supplement(October 24, 1980):   know it / It It gets lost in the steam and chatter of typewriters. It has been played once more. I think you exist only To tease me into doing it, on your level, and then you aren’t there Or have adopted a different attitude. And the poem Has set me softly down beside you. The poem is you.

Sitting between the sea and the buildings He enjoyed painting the sea’s portrait. But just as children imagine a prayer Is merely silence, he expected his subject To rush up the sand, and, seizing a brush, Plaster its own portrait on the canvas. So there was never any paint on his canvas Until the people who lived in the buildings Put him to work: “Try using the brush As a means to an end. Select, for a portrait, Something less angry and large, and more subject To a painter’s moods, or, perhaps, to a prayer.” How could he explain to them his prayer That nature, not art, might usurp the canvas? He chose his wife for a new subject, Making her vast, like ruined buildings, As if, forgetting itself, the portrait Had expressed itself without a brush. Slightly encouraged, he dipped his brush In the sea, murmuring a heartfelt prayer: “My soul, when I paint this next portrait Let it be you who wrecks the canvas.” The news spread like wildfire through the buildings: He had gone back to the sea for his subject. Imagine a painter crucified by his subject! Too exhausted even to lift his brush, He provoked some artists leaning from the buildings To malicious mirth: “We haven’t a prayer Now, of putting ourselves on canvas, Or getting the sea to sit for a portrait!” Others declared it a self-portrait. Finally all indications of a subject Began to fade, leaving the canvas Perfectly white. He put down the brush. At once a howl, that was also a prayer, Arose from the overcrowded buildings. They tossed him, the portrait, from the tallest of the buildings; And the sea devoured the canvas and the brush As though his subject had decided to remain a prayer.

Is anything central? Orchards flung out on the land, Urban forests, rustic plantations, knee-high hills? Are place names central? Elm Grove, Adcock Corner, Story Book Farm? As they concur with a rush at eye level Beating themselves into eyes which have had enough Thank you, no more thank you. And they come on like scenery mingled with darkness The damp plains, overgrown suburbs, Places of known civic pride, of civil obscurity. These are connected to my version of America But the juice is elsewhere. This morning as I walked out of your room After breakfast crosshatched with Backward and forward glances, backward into light, Forward into unfamiliar light, Was it our doing, and was it The material, the lumber of life, or of lives We were measuring, counting? A mood soon to be forgotten In crossed girders of light, cool downtown shadow In this morning that has seized us again? I know that I braid too much on my own Snapped-off perceptions of things as they come to me. They are private and always will be. Where then are the private turns of event Destined to bloom later like golden chimes Released over a city from a highest tower? The quirky things that happen to me, and I tell you, And you know instantly what I mean? What remote orchard reached by winding roads Hides them? Where are these roots? It is the lumps and trials That tell us whether we shall be known And whether our fate can be exemplary, like a star. All the rest is waiting For a letter that never arrives, Day after day, the exasperation Until finally you have ripped it open not knowing what it is, The two envelope halves lying on a plate. The message was wise, and seemingly Dictated a long time ago, but its time has still Not arrived, telling of danger, and the mostly limited Steps that can be taken against danger Now and in the future, in cool yards, In quiet small houses in the country, Our country, in fenced areas, in cool shady streets.

He says he doesn’t feel like working today. It’s just as well. Here in the shade Behind the house, protected from street noises, One can go over all kinds of old feeling, Throw some away, keep others. The wordplay Between us gets very intense when there are Fewer feelings around to confuse things. Another go-round? No, but the last things You always find to say are charming, and rescue me Before the night does. We are afloat On our dreams as on a barge made of ice, Shot through with questions and fissures of starlight That keep us awake, thinking about the dreams As they are happening. Some occurrence. You said it. I said it but I can hide it. But I choose not to. Thank you. You are a very pleasant person. Thank you. You are too.