Houseboat Days: Poems (9 page)

Exploded into an ear of sky. Today the hospitals

Are light, airy places, tented clouds, and the weeping

In corridors is like autumn showers. It’s beginning.

*

Unless this is the shelf of whatever happens? The cold sunrise attacks one side of the giant capital letters, bestirs a little the landmass as it sinks, grateful but asleep. And you too are a rebus from another century, your fiction in piles like lace, in that a new way of appreciating has been invented, that tomorrow will be quantitatively and qualitatively different—young love, cheerful, insubstantial things—and that these notions have been paraded before, though never with the flashing density climbing higher with you on the beanstalk until the jewelled mosaic of hills, ploughed fields and rivers agreed to be so studied and fell away forever, a gash of laughter, a sneeze of gold dust into the prism that weeps and remains solid.

Well had she represented the patient’s history to his apathetic scrutiny. Always there was something to see, something going on,
for the historical past owed it to itself, our historical present.
There were visiting firemen, rumors of chattels on a spree, old men made up to look like young women in the polygon of night from which light sometimes breaks, to be sucked back, armies of foreigners who could not understand each other, the sickening hush just before the bleachers collapse, the inevitable uninvited and only guest who writes on the wall: I choose not to believe. It became a part of oral history. Things overheard in cafes assumed an importance previously reserved for letters from the front. The past was a dream of doctors and drugs. This wasn’t misspent time. Oh, sometimes it’d seem like doing the same thing over and over, until I had passed beyond whatever the sense of it had been. Besides, hadn’t it all ended a long time back, on some clear, washed-out afternoon, with a stiff breeze that seemed to shout: go back! For the moated past lives by these dreams of decorum that take into account any wisecracks made at their expense. It is not called living in a past. If history were only minding one’s business, but, once under the gray shade of mist drawn across us … And who am I to speak this way, into a shoe? I know that evening is busy with lights, cars … That the curve will include me if I must stand here. My warm regards are cold, falling back to the vase again like a fountain. Responsible to whom? I have chosen this environment and it is handsome: a festive niching of bare twigs against the sky, masks under the balconies

that

I sing alway

John Ashbery was born in 1927 in Rochester, New York, and grew up on a farm near Lake Ontario. He studied English at Harvard and at Columbia, and along with his friends Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch, he became a leading voice in what came to be called the New York School of poets. Ashbery’s poetry collection
Some Trees
was selected by W. H. Auden as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize in 1955—the first of over twenty-five critically admired works Ashbery has published in a career spanning more than six decades. His book
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
(1975) received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award, and since then Ashbery has been the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a National Humanities Medal, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and a Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other honors.

For years, Ashbery taught creative writing at Brooklyn College and Bard College in New York, working with students and codirecting MFA programs while continuing to write and publish award-winning collections of poetry—all marked by his signature philosophical wit, ardent honesty, and polyphonic explorations of modern language. His most recent book of poems is
Quick Question
, published in 2012. He lives in New York.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publications, in which some of the poems in this book originally appeared:
American Poetry Review
: “Variant,” “The Couple in the Next Room,” “Lost and Found and Lost Again,” and “Saying It to Keep It From Happening.”
Antaeus
: “Crazy Weather” and “Birds-Eye View of the Tool and Die Co.”
Chicago Review
: “All Kinds of Caresses” and “The Thief of Poetry.”
Denver Quarterly:
“Unctuous Platitudes” and “On the Towpath.”
Georgia Review
: “Loving Mad Tom” and “Whether It Exists.”
New York Review of Books:
“Valentine,” “Houseboat Days,” “Street Musicians,” “The Gazing Grain,” “Wet Casements,” and “Friends.”
The New Yorker:
“Melodic Trains,” “Collective Dawns,” “The Lament upon the Waters,” “The Wrong Kind of Insurance.”
Poetry
: “The Ice-Cream Wars,” “Blue Sonata,” “Syringa,” and “Fantasia on ‘The Nut-Brown Maid’”
Roof
: “Two Deaths.”
The Scotsman
: “The Explanation.”
Spectator
: “And
Ut Pictura Poesis
Is Her Name.”
Sun
: “And Others, Vaguer Presences.”
Times Literary Supplement:
“Business Personals” and “Daffy Duck in Hollywood.”
Vanderbilt Poetry Review
: “What Is Poetry.”
Yale French Studies
: “Drame Bourgeois.”
Z:
“The Other Tradition” and “Wooden Buildings.”

“The Serious Doll” was first published by the Kermani Press. “Pyrography” was commissioned by the U.S. Department of the Interior for its Bicentennial exhibition, “America 1976,” and first appeared in the exhibition catalog published by the Hereward Lester Cooke Foundation.

Copyright © 1975, 1976, 1977 by John Ashbery

Cover design by Mimi Bark

978-1-4804-5945-8

This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

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FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA