Read Chinese Whispers: Poems Online
Authors: John Ashbery
In London just now is cold.
In London just now a gull spring
in London on the back of the bat
in London on the back of that.
When they and London remove the bat back
the bat backer became the bat back.
The butt packer begat the back pack
under lest the noise disturb those that bat back.
In the backing the true bat resides
under a cleft the cliff nose
gannets nosed underside.
The cliff-size size briar sizes up size,
decides size is lies under briar thighs.
That was a lot of that and lack
come down the stair decorum
and lack of reasonable store bin
under the store the straw was been.
Me like methink it all past being
and beyond into the been that he sinned,
the being that has seen
under the hedgerow greens as feline
is opposed to oppressed being been
and never two of us no no more we’ll have been.
The barn exploded.
The big store ripped apart.
Gravel on the lawn made its mark
yes that and festoon of grit in the sky
while the riders came riding by
and nobody was appointed to fill the exam
no others why no other have ever been
why the irritated sky
and we’ll never be the fly
not two slates ever to fly by
and no more store no more in store by the fly
they fly by and take just as your daddy did
and stand by the chest
just make sure to be to the thigh
came crawling across clock’s tempest.
It comes down to
so little:
the gauzy syntax
of one thing and another;
a pleasant dinner
and a frozen train ride into the exhaustible
resources.
We’d had almost enough,
tossing the cap to first one
and then the other one,
but still weren’t determined
to give up the drive.
It had so much we wanted!
But besides that, was
fickle, overdetermined.
So I passed on that.
It was worth it.
Angelic eventide came along after afternoon,
a colibri fluttered questioning wings,
all so we might be taken out,
aired.
And when the post-climax happened
in soft shards, falling
this way and that,
signing the night’s emeralds away,
we took it to be a sign of something.
“Must be a sign of something.”
Then the wind came on, and winter with it.
“Why, weren’t we just here,
five minutes ago?”
I thought I’d have another look,
but that way is all changed, and besides,
no one goes there anymore,
it’s too popular.
Just one fragment
is all I ever wanted,
but I can have it, it’s too much,
but its touch is for another time,
when I’m ready.
Crowd ebbs peacefully.
Hey it’s all right.
Those who came closest did not come close.
The unknown leaned out to them,
then it was post-afternoon. Yes, Jerry built it.
There are many of them in Old Town.
What with one thing and another
you gave me all sorts of fur presents, you know.
It was good to come back. Gumball machines furnish
the library’s stark living style.
You can’t compete with what the
car tells its owner. One by one you are mortal
if the watershed idea catches on
and if we are credited for our utterance.
They thought serendipity was the most beautiful thing in the world.
They were right. As the wheel takes hold,
other inspirations spike it.
There was no year like it for taxation.
FDR decreed a large public works program
that had to be supported with funds from somewhere.
Inevitably, these took the form of taxation.
As when a redbreast calls, there is someone to hear it.
Calico got pasted over the mouse hole.
What are we doing in a theater more than one
wondered. Leaves fled like falling stocks.
The album sinks through fog, its unclasped pages
oozing afterthoughts: “If he weren’t such a sacrificial lamb
we’d have been delivered sooner. As it is, he grasps at straws
or fluff to keep his conscience afloat, which, in any case, seethes
in the authorial chant of bees.”
Don’t make him jump through hoops, I heard another one say
of me. Hey, I was just getting down to business.
A cab appeared at the door, as though summoned.
That it gave me quite a turn I don’t have to tell you.
You know you’ve arrived at bedlam when the arc lights
expire. Alternate-side-of-the-street parking has been suspended,
as has parking. Other than dishpan hands
I have naught to fondle you with. The memory eddies,
sinks, bobs up again, is carried away for good. Now,
what was I telling you? You’re telling me. And beyond that point
of darkness, good citizens don’t go. It’s implanted
in their genes, to flower along the way. And a good job
it’s not, old sod.
Like Knights Templar, we took our time, making sure
we were getting there. Sooner or later the proof dissolves
in the pudding. Made to look inconvenient, we had our say
again, and it was all profit and loss; the streets
had nowhere to go. We lived like nabobs, piling excess
on excess, till one fine day there was nothing left to wake up to.
I suppose it’s for that we’re being punished,
only this punishment is more like a thrill,
the slow beginning of a roller-coaster ride.
Be admonished then, but don’t take
it too much to heart either. Their records need you and your kind.
It might have made
Cindy’s testimony
less credible,
and now seems at low ebb.
It may be just cold enough now.
Stars may have become polluted.
You go on your nerve.
Take no prisoners.
Fine. I don’t want any prisoners
anyway I thought.
Stretched by history,
teething a new day,
what is convoluted gets to be convoluted,
and our brief passion left its scar,
firmly, on murk
which was OK until that other day.
Father of the bending serpents—
as they look back on the 21st century
what will
we
see?
Now he’s retiring and she’s retiring and their kids are retiring—
I say sir I don’t feel
though I have never felt better.
Better to be the cusp of someone’s tongue
and the materials of a new room begin arriving.
Par délicatesse j’ai perdu ma vie.
—Rimbaud
Days, things, times of day. Big things like unseen bells. Unheard moments. Suburbs are pale orange and a greenish blue I associate with fire escapes and school. The school looms now: a person with five questions at its back. They can’t stay there, for now. They’ll be back.
The interrogation was like a question mark. Once you stop to listen you’re hooked. No, go back to the stone please. What did it say over the stone? Don’t say I can’t remember, you remember everything. That is true but I’ll remember the stone
like the face of only the third dead person I’d ever seen. Well it’s happened, he seemed to be saying. The eyes were closed (I suppose they always are). What are you going to do now? We don’t have to stay like this. We could meet perhaps outside. Have a tea like we used to.
They moved the hotel boat to a less ostentatious location, still it felt hard coming to you through trees and other animated life. “Its music doesn’t gel.” Yes, but a weird creepy feeling came over me that you might know about all this, not wanted to tell me but just know. It’s amazing how the past shrinks to the size of your palm, forced to hold all that now. Falling down the steps in Marlborough Street. That was just one thing, but others I don’t know, never will know, are cupped in the hand as well. To brave the day turning outward like an ear, too polite to hear.
Rimbaud said it well, though his speech could be clamorous. One accepts that too within a broader parterre of accepting, a load of sun coming over the house to dampen discreet despair, woven into the togs of somebody standing up to go having remarked on the time as though there were a time to go. One would rather be left with few words and the resulting remainder of unease than never to have left the party.
Visions of a terrace with a cell phone ought to be engraved on the waiting skull, like Brahms. Anxious in the predicate but adept socially, pressure to have the music come out in a certain place, where it can be abandoned if desired. How about it? I care too much
not to leave it all. Set this down too ...
A merry-go-round reminds itself of flies,
listing dangerously in its element.
Thousands of years engrossed its sullen size.
In boiled wool and woolen lace, clockwise
our elders cinched a quad with ice o’ersprent
as merry-go-rounds bethought themselves of flies.
Glimpsed sharp in ragged dawn the old franchise
builds for us what they could have hardly meant.
Thousands of years engross its sullen size
that demon domestics haste to neutralize.
As in old flickers, laughs and colors blent
in a merry-go-round, doom themselves like flies—
though it’s not urgent; there’s time to entomologize.
We need only yawn, following the docent’s
trail, and thousands of years engross our sullen size.
Age sags; little’s left to elegize.
Waking from waltz-dream with time to repent
our merry-go-round bestirs itself, then flies.
Thousands of tears erode its sullen sides.
I
The philosopher walked over to me and tapped me on the brow
with his pencil. Now does
this
remind you of anything?
Have you ever seen anything like this before?
Yes, if it’s in sync with the marrow of the growing world.
I can relate to that mattress. I do. I mean I do, sometimes.
And what day of the week might this be?
I’ll make a wild guess—it’s Thursday. You’re wrong,
though it
seems
like a Thursday. They sent me the
Times
upstream all the way, it arrived and began to smile, I
was startled, I always am when it’s like that. But this
time it was different, more was at stake, though I don’t know
what, exactly. More overtime, perhaps. Get
on with it, we don’t have all night. You think
I
like watching the candles gutter? Well, do you?
Yes, I think you do rather, but that’s not the point.
Well what is the fucking point? It’s that you were here,
earlier, and took too long to get here. By then
it was too late, but you’d been here earlier, hoping to cast
it as earlier, and yourself in a favorable light.
That light is now swaying from the chandelier, like an orangutan
awaiting further instructions, in mid-mischief, wondering if
all this is porridge after all. The philosopher is your boyfriend.
Remember you were hot before. Now it seems like an unseasonable crust,
with breath still to be counted, the weird smell,
and the way it all tallies with the trellis up the chimney.
You
, on the other hand, were out of the country, or so you say,
and so couldn’t possibly have witnessed the flare
that in fact no one saw, and can get on with it. My
conscience is clear. I’m hungry, and lunch, or supper, is waiting.
II
Between sleep and rubbish is the remembrance,
scent to one who can smell. What a relief, though—if snow flies
and they decide to walk back into it, that will make one more game.
Yes,
mon chou
, the way it is has been decided. When they come up for air
at the same moment, a truce is called,
and the staircase draped with shagreen. Others
than they may of course make decisions, but only in the infinity
of ways which concern us. We blacked out for a moment.
Still others avoid laxatives and beef. We cannot logically condone
headway in the matter. I said you brought back library books
that were due on June 23, 1924, and you owe me four trillion eight hundred
thousand twenty-three cents. Luckily a moratorium
was introduced in the last decade, forgiveness was invented,
and you are free to sulk by the ladder.
As it was I took the elevator to the top,
walked around and didn’t see anything and came back down.
Then, acting on a hunch, I went up much faster
than the first time, and spotted two lovers entwined on the horizon,
but let them go, training the big bertha instead on a rabbit
limping across hallowed ground, was dismissed, took early retirement instead
to avoid embarrassment all round, and now am as you see me:
a blind cook serving pornographic muffins to paying guests
over cocktails before the sea opens and drinks us, then closes over us,
smacking its lips like an idiot.