John Ashbery

The man with the red hat And the polar bear, is he here too? The window giving on shade, Is that here too? And all the little helps, My initials in the sky, The hay of an arctic summer night? The bear Drops dead in sight of the window. Lovely tribes have just moved to the north. In the flickering evening the martins grow denser. Rivers of wings surround us and vast tribulation.

The first of the undecoded messages read: “Popeye sits in thunder, Unthought of. From that shoebox of an apartment, From livid curtain’s hue, a tangram emerges: a country.” Meanwhile the Sea Hag was relaxing on a green couch: “How pleasant To spend one’s vacation en la casa de Popeye,” she scratched Her cleft chin’s solitary hair. She remembered spinach And was going to ask Wimpy if he had bought any spinach. “M’love,” he intercepted, “the plains are decked out in thunder Today, and it shall be as you wish.” He scratched The part of his head under his hat. The apartment Seemed to grow smaller. “But what if no pleasant Inspiration plunge us now to the stars?For this is my country.” Suddenly they remembered how it was cheaper in the country. Wimpy was thoughtfully cutting open a number 2 can of spinach When the door opened and Swee’pea crept in. “How pleasant!” But Swee’pea looked morose. A note was pinned to his bib. “Thunder And tears are unavailing,” it read. “Henceforth shall Popeye’s apartment Be but remembered space, toxic or salubrious, whole or scratched.” Olive came hurtling through the window; its geraniums scratched Her long thigh. “I have news!” she gasped. “Popeye, forced as you know to flee the country One musty gusty evening, by the schemes of his wizened, duplicate father, jealous of the apartment And all that it contains, myself and spinach In particular, heaves bolts of loving thunder At his own astonished becoming, rupturing the pleasant Arpeggio of our years. No more shall pleasant Rays of the sun refresh your sense of growing old, nor the scratched Tree-trunks and mossy foliage, only immaculate darkness and thunder.” She grabbed Swee’pea. “I’m taking the brat to the country.” “But you can’t do that—he hasn’t even finished his spinach,” Urged the Sea Hag, looking fearfully around at the apartment. But Olive was already out of earshot. Now the apartment Succumbed to a strange new hush. “Actually it’s quite pleasant Here,” thought the Sea Hag. “If this is all we need fear from spinach Then I don’t mind so much. Perhaps we could invite Alice the Goon over”—she scratched One dug pensively—“but Wimpy is such a country Bumpkin, always burping like that.” Minute at first, the thunder Soon filled the apartment. It was domestic thunder, The color of spinach. Popeye chuckled and scratched His balls: it sure was pleasant to spend a day in the country.

We have a friend in common, the retired sophomore. His concern: that I shall get it like that, in the right and righter of a green bush chomping on future considerations. In the ghostly dreams of others it appears I am all right, and even going on tomorrow there is much to be said on all these matters, “issues,” like “No rest for the weary.” (And yet—why not?) Feeling under orders is a way of showing up, but stepping on Earth—she’s not going to. Ten shades of pleasing himself brings us to tomorrow evening and will be back for more. I disagree with you completely but couldn’t be prouder and fonder of you. So drink up. Feel good for two. I do it in a lot of places. Subfusc El Dorado is only one that I know something about. Others are recently lost cities where we used to live—they keep the names we knew, sometimes. I do it in a lot of places. Brash brats offer laughing advice, as though anything I cared about could be difficult or complicated now. That’s the rub. Gusts of up to forty-five miles an hour will be dropping in later on tonight. No reason not to. So point at the luck we know about. Living is a meatloaf sandwich. I had a good time up there.

Things I left on your paper: one of the craziest episodes that ever overtook me. Do you like espionage? A watered charm? My pod cast aside, I’ll walk in the human street, protect the old jib from new miniseries. I could swear it moved in incomplete back yards to endorse the conversation, request to be strapped in. Then it will be time to take the step giving fragile responses, and finally he wrote the day. It happened in the water so that was nice. It comes ready conflated: vanilla for get lost, flavor of the time of his sponsor’s destiny. Be on that sofa. I was crossing the state line as they were reburying the stuff. You break the time lock, the bride’s canister    ... but we did say that we’d be back.

Whether the harborline or the east shoreline consummated it was nobody’s biz until you got there, eyelids ashimmer, content with one more dispensation from blue above. And just like we were saying, the people began to show some interest in the mud-choked harbor. It could be summer again for all anyone in our class knew. Yeah, that’s right. Bumped from our dog-perch, we’d had to roil with the last of them. It’s taken a while since I’ve been here, but I’m resolved. What, didn’t I print, little piles of notes, slopes almost Sicilian? Here is my friend: Socks for comfort (now boys) will see later. Did they come? The inner grocery had to take three sets of clips away. Speaking to him of intricate family affairs. I’m not what you think. Stay preconscious. It’s just the “flooding of the council.” No need to feel afraid.

That night the wind stirred in the forsythia bushes, but it was a wrong one, blowing in the wrong direction. “That’s silly. How can there be a wrong direction? ‘It bloweth where it listeth,’ as you know, just as we do when we make love or do something else there are no rules for.” I tell you, something went wrong there a while back. Just don’t ask me what it was. Pretend I’ve dropped the subject. No, now you’ve got me interested, I want to know exactly what seems wrong to you, how something could seem wrong to you. In what way do things get to be wrong? I’m sitting here dialing my cellphone with one hand, digging at some obscure pebbles with my shovel with the other. And then something like braids will stand out, on horsehair cushions. That armchair is really too lugubrious. We’ve got to change all the furniture, fumigate the house, talk our relationship back to its beginnings. Say, you know that’s probably what’s wrong—the beginnings concept, I mean. I aver there are no beginnings, though there were perhaps some sometime. We’d stopped, to look at the poster the movie theater had placed freestanding on the sidewalk. The lobby cards drew us in. It was afternoon, we found ourselves sitting at the end of a row in the balcony; the theater was unexpectedly crowded. That was the day we first realized we didn’t fully know our names, yours or mine, and we left quietly amid the gray snow falling. Twilight had already set in.

And in a little while we broke under the strain: suppurations ad nauseam, the wanting to be taller, though it‘s simply about being mysterious, i.e., not taller, like any tree in any forest. Mute, the pancake describes you. It had tiny roman numerals embedded in its rim. It was a pancake clock. They had ’em in those days, always getting smaller, which is why they finally became extinct. It was a hundred years before anyone noticed. The governor general called it “sinuous.” But we, we had other names for it, knew it was going to be around for a long time, even though extinct. And sure as shillelaghs fall from trees onto frozen doorsteps, it came round again when all memory of it had been expunged from the common brain. Everybody wants to try one of those new pancake clocks. A boyfriend in the next town had one but conveniently forgot to bring it over each time we invited him. Finally the rumors grew more fabulous than the real thing: I hear they are encrusted with tangles of briar rose, so dense not even a prince seeking the Sleeping Beauty could get inside. What’s more, there are more of them than when they were extinct, yet the prices keep on rising. They have them in the Hesperides and in shantytowns on the edge of the known world, blue with cold. All downtowns used to feature them. Camera obscuras, too, were big that year. But why is it that with so many people who want to know what a shout is about, nobody can find the original recipe? All too soon, no one cares. We go back to doing little things for each other, pasting stamps together to form a tiny train track, and other, less noticeable things. And the past is forgotten till next time. How to describe the years? Some were like blocks of the palest halvah, careless of being touched. Some took each others’ trash out, put each other’s eyes out. So many got thrown out before anyone noticed, that it was like a chiaroscuro of collapsing clouds. How I longed to visit you again in that old house! But you were deaf, or dead. Our letters crossed. A motorboat was ferrying me out past the reef, people on shore looked like dolls fingering stuffs. More keeps coming out, about the dogs I mean. Surely a simple embrace from an itinerant fish would have been spurned at certain periods. Not now. There is a famine of years in the land, the women are beautiful, but prematurely old and worn. It doesn’t get better. Rocks half-buried in bands of sand, and spontaneous execrations. I yell to the ship’s front door, wanting to be taller, and somewhere in the middle all this gets lost. I was a phantom for a day. My friends carried me around with them. It always turns out that much is salvageable. Chicken coops haven’t floated away on the flood. Lacemakers are back in business with a vengeance. All the locksmiths had left town during the night. It happened to be a beautiful time of season, spring or fall, the air was digestible, the fish tied in love-knots on their gurneys. Yes, and journeys were palpable too: Someone had spoken of saving appearances and the walls were just a little too blue in mid-morning. Was there ever such a time? I’d like to handle you, bruise you with kisses for it, yet something always stops me short: the knowledge that this isn‘t history, no matter how many times we keep mistaking it for the present, that headlines trumpet each day. But behind the unsightly school building, now a pickle warehouse, the true nature of things is known, is not overrided: Yours is a vote like any other. And there is fraud at the ballot boxes, stuffed with lace valentines and fortunes from automatic scales, dispensed with a lofty kind of charity, as though this could matter to us, these tunes carried by the wind from a barrel organ several leagues away. No, this is not the time to reveal your deception to us. Wait till rain and old age have softened us up a little more. Then we’ll see how extinct the various races have become, how the years stand up to their descriptions, no matter how misleading, and how long the disbanded armies stay around. I must congratulate you on your detective work, for I am a connoisseur of close embroidery, though I don’t have a diploma to show for it. The trees, the barren trees, have been described more than once. Always they are taller, it seems, and the river passes them without noticing. We, too, are taller, our ceilings higher, our walls more tinctured with telling frescoes, our dooryards both airier and vaguer, according as time passes and weaves its minute deceptions in and out, a secret thread. Peace is a full stop. And though we had some chance of slipping past the blockade, now only time will consent to have anything to do with us, for what purposes we do not know.

O awaken with me the inquiring goodbyes. Ooh what a messy business a tangle and a muddle (and made it seem quite interesting). He ticks them off: leisure top, a different ride home, whispering, in a way, whispered whiskers, so many of the things you have to share. But I was getting on, and that’s what you don’t need. I’m certainly sorry about scaring your king, if indeed that’s what happened to him. You get Peanuts and War and Peace, some in rags, some in jags, some in velvet gown. They want the other side of the printing plant. There were concerns. Say hi to jock itch, leadership principles, urinary incompetence. Take that, perfect pitch. And say a word for the president, for the scholar magazines, papers, a streaming. Then you are interested in poetry.

A hears by chance a familiar name, and the name involves a riddle of the past. B, in love with A, receives an unsigned letter in which the writer states that she is the mistress of A and begs B not to take him away from her. B, compelled by circumstances to be a companion of A in an isolated place, alters her rosy views of love and marriage when she discovers, through A, the selfishness of men. A, an intruder in a strange house, is discovered; he flees through the nearest door into a windowless closet and is trapped by a spring lock. A is so content with what he has that any impulse toward enterprise is throttled. A solves an important mystery when falling plaster reveals the place where some old love letters are concealed. A-4, missing food from his larder, half believes it was taken by a “ghost.” A, a crook, seeks unlawful gain by selling A-8 an object, X, which A-8 already owns. A sees a stranger, A-5, stealthily remove papers, X, from the pocket of another stranger, A-8, who is asleep. A follows A-5. A sends an infernal machine, X, to his enemy, A-3, and it falls into the hands of A’s friend, A-2. Angela tells Philip of her husband’s enlarged prostate, and asks for money. Philip, ignorant of her request, has the money placed in an escrow account. A discovers that his pal, W, is a girl masquerading as a boy. A, discovering that W is a girl masquerading as a boy, keeps the knowledge to himself and does his utmost to save the masquerader from annoying experiences. A, giving ten years of his life to a miserly uncle, U, in exchange for a college education, loses his ambition and enterprise. A, undergoing a strange experience among a people weirdly deluded, discovers the secret of the delusion from Herschel, one of the victims who has died. By means of information obtained from the notebook, A succeeds in rescuing the other victims of the delusion. A dies of psychic shock. Albert has a dream, or an unusual experience, psychic or otherwise, which enables him to conquer a serious character weakness and become successful in his new narrative, “Boris Karloff.” Silver coins from the Mojave Desert turn up in the possession of a sinister jeweler. Three musicians wager that one will win the affections of the local kapellmeister’s wife; the losers must drown themselves in a nearby stream. Ardis, caught in a trap and held powerless under a huge burning glass, is saved by an eclipse of the sun. Kent has a dream so vivid that it seems a part of his waking experience. A and A-2 meet with a tragic adventure, and A-2 is killed. Elvira, seeking to unravel the mystery of a strange house in the hills, is caught in an electrical storm. During the storm the house vanishes and the site on which it stood becomes a lake. Alphonse has a wound, a terrible psychic wound, an invisible psychic wound, which causes pain in flesh and tissue which, otherwise, are perfectly healthy and normal. A has a dream which he conceives to be an actual experience. Jenny, homeward bound, drives and drives, and is still driving, no nearer to her home than she was when she first started. Petronius B. Furlong’s friend, Morgan Windhover, receives a wound from which he dies. Thirteen guests, unknown to one another, gather in a spooky house to hear Toe reading Buster’s will. Buster has left everything to Lydia, a beautiful Siamese girl poet of whom no one has heard. Lassie and Rex tussle together politely; Lassie, wounded, is forced to limp home. In the Mexican gold rush a city planner is found imprisoned by outlaws in a crude cage of sticks. More people flow over the dam and more is learned about the missing electric cactus. Too many passengers have piled onto a cable car in San Francisco; the conductor is obliged to push some of them off. Maddalena, because of certain revelations she has received, firmly resolves that she will not carry out an enterprise that had formerly been dear to her heart. Fog enters into the shaft of a coal mine in Wales. A violent wind blows the fog around. Two miners, Shawn and Hillary, are pursued by fumes. Perhaps Emily’s datebook holds the clue to the mystery of the seven swans under the upas tree. Jarvis seeks to manage Emily’s dress shop and place it on a paying basis. Jarvis’s bibulous friend, Emily, influences Jarvis to take to drink, scoffing at the doctor who has forbidden Jarvis to indulge in spirituous liquors. Jarvis, because of a disturbing experience, is compelled to turn against his friend, Emily. A ham has his double, “Donnie,” take his place in an important enterprise. Jarvis loses his small fortune in trying to help a friend. Lodovico’s friend, Ambrosius, goes insane from eating the berries of a strange plant, and makes a murderous attack on Lodovico. “New narrative” is judged seditious. Hogs from all over go squealing down the street. Ambrosius, suffering misfortune, seeks happiness in the companionship of Joe, and in playing golf. Arthur, in a city street, has a glimpse of Cathy, a strange woman who has caused him to become involved in a puzzling mystery. Cathy, walking in the street, sees Arthur, a stranger, weeping. Cathy abandons Arthur after he loses his money and is injured and sent to a hospital. Arthur, married to Beatrice, is haunted by memories of a former sweetheart, Cornelia, a heartless coquette whom Alvin loves. Sauntering in a park on a fine day in spring, Tricia and Plotinus encounter a little girl grabbing a rabbit by its ears. As they remonstrate with her, the girl is transformed into a mature woman who regrets her feverish act. Running up to the girl, Alvin stumbles and loses his coins. In a nearby dell, two murderers are plotting to execute a third. Beatrice loved Alvin before he married. B, second wife of A, discovers that B-3, A’s first wife, was unfaithful. B, wife of A, dons the mask and costume of B-3, A’s paramour, and meets A as B-3; his memory returns and he forgets B-3, and goes back to B. A discovers the “Hortensius,” a lost dialogue of Cicero, and returns it to the crevice where it lay. Ambrose marries Phyllis, a nice girl from another town. Donnie and Charlene are among the guests invited to the window. No one remembers old Everett, who is left to shrivel in a tower. Pellegrino, a rough frontiersman in a rough frontier camp, undertakes to care for an orphan. Ildebrando constructs a concealed trap, and a person near to him, Gwen, falls into the trap and cannot escape.

Impatient as we were for all of them to join us, The land had not yet risen into view: gulls had swept the gray steel towers away So that it profited less to go searching, away over the humming earth Than to stay in immediate relation to these other things—boxes, store parts, whatever you wanted to call them— Whose installedness was the price of further revolutions, so you knew this combat was the last. And still the relationship waxed, billowed like scenery on the breeze. They are the same aren’t they, The presumed landscape and the dream of home Because the people are all homesick today or desperately sleeping, Trying to remember how those rectangular shapes Became so extraneous and so near To create a foreground of quiet knowledge In which youth had grown old, chanting and singing wise hymns that Will sign for old age And so lift up the past to be persuaded, and be put down again. The warning is nothing more than an aspirate “h”; The problem is sketched completely, like fireworks mounted on poles: Complexion of evening, the accurate voices of the others. During Coca-Cola lessons it becomes patent Of noise on the left, and we had so skipped a stage that The great wave of the past, compounded in derision, Submerged idea and non-dreamer alike In falsetto starlight like “purity” Of design that had been the first danger sign To wash the sticky, icky stuff down the drain—pfui! How does it feel to be outside and inside at the same time, The delicious feeling of the air contradicting and secretly abetting The interior warmth? But the land curdles the dismay in which it’s written Bearing to a final point of folly and doom The wisdom of these generations. Look at what you’ve done to the landscape— The ice cube, the olive— There is a perfect tri-city mesh of things Extending all the way along the river on both sides With the end left for thoughts on construction That are always turning to alps and thresholds Above the tide of others, feeding a European moss rose without glory. We shall very soon have the pleasure of recording A period of unanimous tergiversation in this respect And to make that pleasure the greater, it is worth while At the risk of tedious iteration, to put first upon record a final protest: Rather decaying art, genius, inspiration to hold to An impossible “calque” of reality, than “The new school of the trivial, rising up on the field of battle, Something of sludge and leaf-mold,” and life Goes trickling out through the holes, like water through a sieve, All in one direction. You who were directionless, and thought it would solve everything if you found one, What do you make of this? Just because a thing is immortal Is that any reason to worship it? Death, after all, is immortal. But you have gone into your houses and shut the doors, meaning There can be no further discussion. And the river pursues its lonely course With the sky and the trees cast up from the landscape For green brings unhappiness—le vert Porte malheur. “The chartreuse mountain on the absinthe plain Makes the strong man’s tears tumble down like rain.” All this came to pass eons ago. Your program worked out perfectly. You even avoided The monotony of perfection by leaving in certain flaws: A backward way of becoming, a forced handshake, An absent-minded smile, though in fact nothing was left to chance. Each detail was startlingly clear, as though seen through a magnifying glass, Or would have been to an ideal observer, namely yourself— For only you could watch yourself so patiently from afar The way God watches a sinner on the path to redemption, Sometimes disappearing into valleys, but always on the way, For it all builds up into something, meaningless or meaningful As architecture, because planned and then abandoned when completed, To live afterwards, in sunlight and shadow, a certain amount of years. Who cares about what was there before? There is no going back, For standing still means death, and life is moving on, Moving on towards death. But sometimes standing still is also life.