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Authors: John Ashbery

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they called it, and would have it no other way. Gradually my hands readjusted

to the stitchery in the tablecloth. If it was going to be
this
way, why

not pass the wine around again. Hoist up your stocking

to where the emerald stickpin has pierced it, a joy

for all to see. Say, I suddenly realized I want

to be you along for the ride. Why not? And the breeze

is cool.

You see, in your pharmacopeia of battered notions

just the right things prevail. A man is his house. Two naked girls

are in tubetops. Fun to see. A lazy susan spins round again:

What has it brought you this time?

Are there going to be summer suckers?

What’ll be the big surprise?

Good news. The universe has been challenged again

by a schoolboy in South Orange. And oh yes,

long division has come out on top.

To see you the way you go this way

is to know the marvelous state of tulips in this our parkway.

What goes around comes around. The medicine dropper approached the sky.

This
will soon cure
that.

So wonderful you could see us again.

FLOATINGLY

Kill the white beaches, the hotel, bugs!

The crumbs on a table sang this song to insulate themselves,

but the chickens merely pecked harder. We do, we don’t, we do, we do mean

to vacuum these crumbs, unless someday an idiot boy

pass through the wood on his way to the ballpark,

tossing his cap unassumingly, for what is, in fact, a gesture?

It is only a gesture. So, sure, morons

can be on your side of the spleen fence: It’s only gurus

matter to outsiders, after all, the lame girl said.

She spoke, and I averred:

No one who has known this beach can undo the righteousness that begat it

out of sand, close to a fence.

By the same token, one needs two tin cans.

And let the browsers beware, she famously

ad-libbed, for chickens are like jurists in at least one sense:

Neither is wanted when the old line undulates,

shrieking its core across water.

No saffron impediment to evening’s fine-sanded

elliptical body,

for the presence of a mote is always singular.

Towheaded ideas learn from and are transformed by them.

We have only too much lettuce, lettuce to give away.

Our fronds shall not know us

nor apocryphal lectures train us to eye the side aisles.

TENEBRAE

For a little snow you get your asking price:

the Ace of Wounds, star of tubs, brushfires

from there to here like an afterthought,

and this suddenly not all that you willed it to be.

We marched in different directions.

Once a week there’s a very big field day.

Plant two skyscrapers. Then the moat will be less

unexpected. It’s coming round to you again;

indeed, it dances. And in this starting to be something

something disappears, but a shine prevails.

And they don’t pay attention,

and they don’t pay attention, that’s all I can say.

See what the prisoners of war are all about.

How close are you? Rocks seep into the night

and the clay gets the attention it deserves.

We build and build our shadow-pulpit,

then seize morning when it comes,

in chirrupy stride: names of the lost ships,

lasting until today, until nostalgia sets in. We’re home

in what passes for a city in America (are the streets

laughing at us?). We can’t drive yet,

or even walk.

And one is given the run of the land.

OUTSIDE MY WINDOW THE JAPANESE…

Outside my window the Japanese driving range

shivers in its mesh veils, skinny bride

of soon-to-be-spring, ravenous, rapturous. Why is it here?

A puzzle. And what was it doing before, then? An earlier

puzzle. I like how it wraps itself

in not-quite wind—

sure enough,

the time is up. What else do you have in your hand?

Open your hand, please. My elder seraph

just woke up, is banging the coffee-pot lid

into place. See! the coffee flows

crazily to its nest, the doldrums are awake,

jumping up and down on tiptoe, night-blindness ended.

And from where
you
stand,

how many possible equations does it spell out?

My hair’s just snoring back.

The coprophagic earth yields another of its

minute reasons, turns to a quivering mush,

recovers, staggers to its feet, touches the sky

with its yardstick, walks back to the place of received,

enthusiastic entities. Another year … And if we had known last spring

what the buildings knew then, what defeat, it would have turned to mud

all the same in us, waved us down the escalator,

past the counter with free samples of fudge, to where the hostess stands.

This was never my idea, shards, she says. This

is where the anonymous donors carved their initials in my book,

to be a puzzle for jaycees to come, as a nesting-ground

is to an island. Oh, we’d waddle

often, there, stepping in and out of the boat

as though nobody knew what time it was, or cared

which lid the horizon was. We’d get to know

each other in time, and till then it was all a camp meeting, hail-

fellow-well-met, and the barstools

reflected the ceiling’s gummy polish, to the starboard

where purple kings sit, and it was too late for today,

the newspapers had already been printed, telling their tale

along avenues, husks of driftwood

washed ashore again and again, speechless, spun out of control.

What a gorgeous sunset, cigarette case, how tellingly

the coiled rope is modelled, what perfume

in that sound of thunder, invisible! And you wonder

why I came back? Perhaps
this
will refresh your memory,

skateboard, roller skates, the binomial theorem picked out in

brutish, swabbed gasps. All the way to the escape clause

he kept insisting he’d done nothing wrong, and then—pouf!—it was

curtains for him and us, excepting these splinters

of our perpetual remainder, reminder

of all those days to come, and those others, so far back

in the mothering past.

ANY OTHER TIME

A couple of shivers of attitude

ago the ship coasted out of sight

to its life in rain.

More morbid mongrels munching

and the news from over there clouds

the hockey pageant’s desperate coda,

that shakes with the glitter of edges, of the steep

vocabulary that’s coming …

All around us fires

are trained at the center, neatest thing

that ever happened. I’ll bye-bye you

in blue

if it’s the last thing we do.

So we say: Someone had an urge, a whim,

and lightning began there. On all

roads we merely trespass, finding a level,

store-bought thing. Like buying a grapefruit

and having it displayed. Yes and we have teas,

boots for the sore, beds for the weary,

a whole warehouse full of notions,

and this. Makes you kinda comfy.

The less said the more we’ll shut up about it—

on the cusp, actually.

Probably Based On A Dream

Like you’ve done it before

Are you working hard? Hello? Mrs. Grizzli?

Only the happy few know what keeps us

from ballooning into our strength. And when we try

to capture wisps from the rocket,

sinking in the hay, there are those who tell you

to come again another day,

that the past is soiled and forgotten. Yet neither

you nor I know what happens in the thud

of cannon threatening to take off with the wild ducks

thunderously, and you, if I’m not

mistaken, were around here once, once too often

the landlady tells me. Quick! Where is

your whoop? How unexpectedly have we arrived? In a brusque mountain

workshop where tankas are forged, and the truth comes

unsliced, like bread, the captains and the pageants err and repeat;

for nothing all along was it?

But someday, I know, my idol will slip me a pill

for as long as bunkers repeat themselves. Alyssa?

Shovel the maps into the diving helmet.

The press cuttings have come to grief;

wind slaps the high buildings.

You too know Kokomo, O unpreceded one.

THE VILLAGE OF SLEEP

Why, we must dye it then—

Would I like to stay here indefinitely?

We have trees to prune, cryptograms to decode,

it was all a blind running into the light—

She couldn’t say the word for “fish.” Nor are his genes undone

by what oafish submarines remain. Aye, sir,

Captain Nemo, sir, we’ve spotted the junk

in the roads up ahead. What! That spasm I created for my own diversion, now

it’s clearly emerging out of the octopus drool that so long enshrouded it,

while I, a nether spur to its district railway, am overrun with

coughing doubt for the duration, yet here I must stand,

a seeming enigma. Outside, life prattles on merrily,

like an embroidered towel, and would probably be too weak to object

if we decided to postpone the picnic until November.

I hear you; the arches under the embankment

are part of what I’m all about. I too was weaned from excess

in some silvery age now lost in a blizzard of envelopes.

How frostily jingle the harness bells!

It’s all we can do to keep up with the dunce’s velocipede,

while in a neutral corner of the quarry

the same binge of history is conning men’s eyes

into dogged superstition. So we must make sport of it,

reel in our catch while yet there’s time, but droplets

are exploding in the gutter. The gambling ship ferried us away

past larkspur, past concertinas, and the old name became visible again,

briefly, on the building’s dusty façade. I

thought we’d lost you. No,

I’m still here.

Do you want to jump out a shy window?

Little by little one took in the foxes’ keening:

It’s all right, it’s sober,

they chortled. This was just a plant,

it counts only for the next time,

and we in beach goggles, brilliant suspenders … The party beast

in me says let’s abandon, cooler heads say dive,

dive like a frog while famous night is coming on

like the blistered exterior of a sigh.

IN MY HEAD

I walk out over the moors, the hills, the sand valleys.

My head is listless. The wind is scrubbing the stars.

Yet I don’t detonate. There is too much land behind me.

Birds sang it once, then not so much anymore.

I am striving to be late, and to kiss a fish.

It would be a greater one who came back

to the ghost frontier.

She wrote on this.

They all taste pretty much the same,

cut flowers, as I was semen in someone’s mouth, an avalanche of whorls.

What next for me? Not to be the first one there.

And the wind rattles its scarecrow bones in the living

room, the spring came apart in disorder,

all over the rug. The landsman, he must care,

came too, the others joying his renewal, his removal

as in an old dump truck on the fortieth mile of the road.

Seafaring, the faring, and pickling,

so many admonitions to the Great Lout

who watches over us. He must have approved. In the dimness …

THE SPACIOUS FIRMAMENT

Say that this is a street therefore people walk down it.

I stand holding a bunch of keys,

burn up my motto, read Kleist in November.

Can it be that I cannibalize others’ lives,

the lives of others’ words?

Or am I simply going back to where I came from,

not too long ago, to excuse whoever took my place

when I was gone? Sudden indecision,

dear reddish flowers—I am about a comma in space.

I neither go nor return unfazed.

In short I am this comedy you wrote for me to star in.

Yes she waits, time out, time in,

for me to get the wail, whale of a wail, off my chest.

Yes the coddling circuits

that baited

the time giveaway

are standing all over me too like foxglove angels,

drawing in their breath, giving us what we bargained for—

no crossing, chumps at the end of the market

where needle soldiers ferreted us out,

wished us well, taking a piss at a private hall about

a mile down the road,

coming in during the week.

They had put their kilts on first.

Pull you out of my wool,

toiling as the will

bends us to ends and now is no more.

That force going under,

it kind of makes it stand out

and for me too the trees in this room

we bide our time in, happy as in a nursery,

till the times dictate otherwise. Oh, he was a grown man,

scrofulous it’s true, but neither piebald nor land-proud.

A great equator did him in, the fullness of time

waited at the end of my hall, cobbled quodlibets,

procession toward a context. Capitalist

actions forced it into a runoff.

Model villages provide all sorts of

plumbing. Cherry blossoms cascade

in spring, don’t last long.

I think we shall be moving to

the dance baths on the river, river that is ripe,

right for explication, as you do plaster it with the wasps

just coming into being, no names yet.

Twenty years ago my dance professor

BOOK: Wakefulness: Poems
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