The Double Dream of Spring (9 page)

Of that song was to be consumed, corrosive;

A surprise dragging the signs

Of no peace after it, into the disquiet of early accidents.

The head notwithstanding. A narrow strip of land

Coinciding with the riders to where

Illusion mattered no more than the rest. Flat

Walls only surrounding only abating memory.

On this new area ideas kept the same

Distance, with profiles spent into the sparse

Immediacy of excavation, land and gulls to be explored.

It was time to compare all past sets of impressions

Slowly peeling these away so that the mastered

Impression of servitude and barbarism might shrink to allegorical human width.

A moment of addition, then one hidden look

At it all, but it is scattered, not the outline

Of your famous openness, but kind of the sleeves

In the weather time after the doubtful present saluted.

All that ever came of it was words

To indicate any kind of barrier, with the land

Lasting beyond hope or scruple, both cell and vortex.

Further on it is a forest of mud pillars. Determined

To live, so that you and your possessions

May be dealt with at last, you forgot the other previous station.

If there was no truth in it, only pleasure

In the telling, might not others set out

Across impossible oceans with this word whose power

Was the opposite reverence to secret deities

Of shame? Or absent-mindedness? Because the first memory

Now, like patches, was worn, only as the inadequate

Memento of all that was never going to be? Its

Allusion not even blasphemous, but truly insignificant

Beside that lake opening out broader than the sun!

This, then, was indifference: it was what it always had been.

The boat stood hieratically still

On the unread page of water. No moon punching

With ideas of the majesty of crowds. A universal infamy

Became the element of living, a breath

Beyond telling, because forgetful of the

Chaos whose expectancy had engendered it, and so on, through

Popular speech down to the externals of present

Continuing—incomplete, good-natured pictures that

Flatter us even when forgotten with dwarf speculations

About the insane, invigorating whole they don’t represent.

The victims were chosen through lightness in obscurity.

A firm look of the land, old dismissals

And the affair was concluded in snow and also in

The satisfaction of the outline formulated against the sky.

People were delighted getting up in the morning

With the density that for once seemed the promise

Of everything forgotten, and the well-being

Grew, at the expense of whoever lay dying

In a small room watched only by the progression

Of hours in the tight new agreement.

And they now too seem invaded, though before it was

The dancers who anticipated making unnecessary

The curtailment of one to the other. And yet,

As though this were strict premonition, their chance

Is cancelled out by earlier claims, a victim perhaps

Of its earnestness. The dance continues, but darker, and

As if in a sudden lack of air. And as one figure

Supplants another, and dies, so the postulate of each

Tires the shuffling floor with slogans, present

Complements mindful of our absorbing interest.

One swallow does not make a summer, but are

What’s called an opposite: a whole of raveling discontent,

The sum of all that will ever be deciphered

On this side of that vast drop of water.

They let you sleep without pain, having all that

Not in the lesson, not in the special way of telling

But back to one side of life, not especially

Immune to it, in the secret of what goes on:

The words sung in the next room are unavoidable

But their passionate intelligence will be studied in you.

But what could I make of this? Glaze

Of many identical foreclosures wrested from

The operative hand, like a judgment but still

The atmosphere of seeing? That two people could

Collide in this dusk means that the time of

Shapelessly foraging had come undone: the space was

Magnificent and dry. On flat evenings

In the months ahead, she would remember that that

Anomaly had spoken to her, words like disjointed beaches

Brown under the advancing signs of the air.

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.

Copyright © 1997 by John Ashbery

Cover design by Mimi Bark

978-1-4804-5918-2

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