Authors: John Ashbery
Made of a dull crinkled brown leather that no longer exists.
And nothing does, until you name it, remembering, and even then
It may not have existed, or existed only as a result
Of the perceptual dysfunction you’ve been carrying around for years.
The result is magic, then terror, then pity at the emptiness,
Then air gradually bathing and filling the emptiness as it leaks,
Emoting all over something that is probably mere reportage
But nevertheless likes being emoted on. And so each day
Culminates in merriment as well as a deep shock like an electric one,
As the wrecking ball bursts through the wall with the bookshelves
Scattering the works of famous authors as well as those
Of more obscure ones, and books with no author, letting in
Space, and an extraneous babble from the street
Confirming the new value the hollow core has again, the light
From the lighthouse that protects as it pushes us away.
I think a lot about it,
Think quite a lot about it—
The omnipresent possibility of being interrupted
While what I stand for is still almost a bare canvas:
A few traceries, that may be fibers, perhaps
Not even these but shadows, hallucinations….
And it is well then to recall
That this track is the outer rim of a flat crust,
Dimensionless, except for its poor, parched surface,
The face one raises to God,
Not the rich dark composite
We keep to ourselves,
Carpentered together any old way,
Coffee from an old tin can, a belch of daylight,
People leaving the beach.
If I could write it
And also write about it—
The interruption—
Rudeness on the face of it, but who
Knows anything about our behavior?
Forget what it is you’re coming out of,
Always into something like a landscape
Where no one has ever walked
Because they’re too busy.
Excitedly you open your rhyming dictionary.
It has begun to snow.
The first year was like icing.
Then the cake started to show through.
Which was fine, too, except you forget the direction you’re taking.
Suddenly you are interested in some new thing
And can’t tell how you got here. Then there is confusion
Even out of happiness, like a smoke—
The words get heavy, some topple over, you break others.
And outlines disappear once again.
Heck, it’s anybody’s story,
A sentimental journey—“gonna take a sentimental journey,”
And we do, but you wake up under the table of a dream:
You are that dream, and it is the seventh layer of you.
We haven’t moved an inch, and everything has changed.
We are somewhere near a tennis court at night.
We get lost in life, but life knows where we are.
We can always be found with our associates.
Haven’t you always wanted to curl up like a dog and go to sleep like a dog?
In the rash of partings and dyings (the new twist),
There’s also room for breaking out of living.
Whatever happens will be quite ingenious.
No acre but will resume being disputed now,
And paintings are one thing we never seem to run out of.
We have the looks you want:
The gonzo (musculature seemingly wired to the stars);
Colors like lead, khaki and pomegranate; things you
Put in your hair, with the whole panoply of the past:
Landscape embroidery, complete sets of this and that.
It’s bankruptcy, the human haul,
The shining, bulging nets lifted out of the sea, and always a few refugees
Dropping back into the no-longer-mirthful kingdom
On the day someone sells an old house
And someone else begins to add on to his: all
In the interests of this pornographic masterpiece,
Variegated, polluted skyscraper to which all gazes are drawn,
Pleasure we cannot and will not escape.
It seems we were going home.
The smell of blossoming privet blanketed the narrow avenue.
The traffic lights were green and aqueous.
So this is the subterranean life.
If it can’t be conjugated onto us, what good is it?
What need for purists when the demotic is built to last,
To outlast us, and no dialect hears us?
The persimmon velvet curtain rose swiftly to reveal a space of uncertain dimensions and perspective. At the lower left was a grotto, the cave of Mania, goddess of confusion. Larches, alders and Douglas fir were planted so thickly around the entrance that one could scarcely make it out. In the dooryard a hyena chained to a pole slunk back and forth, back and forth, continually measuring the length of its chain, emitting the well-known laughing sound all the while, except at intervals when what appeared to be fragments of speech would issue from its maw. It was difficult to hear the words, let alone understand them, though now and then a phrase like “Up your arse!” or “Turn the rascals out!” could be distinguished for a moment, before subsiding into a confused chatter. Close by the entrance to the grotto was a metal shoescraper in the form of a hyena, and very like this particular one, whose fur was a grayish-white faintly tinged with pink, and scattered over with foul, liver-colored spots. On the other side of the dooryard opposite the hyena’s pole was a graceful statue of Mercury on a low, gilded pedestal, facing out toward the audience with an expression of delighted surprise on his face. The statue seemed to be made of lead or some other dull metal, painted an off-white which had begun to flake in places, revealing the metal beneath which was of almost the same color. As yet there was no sign of the invisible proprietress of the grotto.
A little to the right and about eight feet above this scene, another seemed to hover in mid-air. It suggested the interior of an English pub, as it might be imitated in Paris. Behind the bar, opposite the spectators in the audience, was a mural adapted from a Tenniel illustration for
Through the Looking Glass
—the famous one in which a fish in a footman’s livery holds out a large envelope to a frog footman who has just emerged onto the front stoop of a small house, while in the background, partially concealed by the trunk of a tree, Alice lurks, an expression of amusement on her face. Time and the fumes of a public house had darkened the colors almost to a rich mahogany glow, and if one had not known the illustration it would have been difficult to make out some of the details.
Seven actors and actresses, representing seven nursery-rhyme characters, populated the scene. Behind the bar the bald barman, Georgie Porgie, stood motionless, gazing out at the audience. In front and a little to his left, lounging on a tall stool, was Little Jack Horner, in fact quite a tall and roguish-looking young man wearing a trench coat and expensive blue jeans; he had placed his camera on the bar near him. He too faced out toward the audience. In front of him, his back to the audience, Little Boy Blue partially knelt before him, apparently performing an act of fellatio on him. Boy Blue was entirely clothed in blue denim, of an ordinary kind.
To their left, Simple Simon and the Pie Man stood facing each other in profile. The Pie Man’s gaze was directed toward the male couple at the center of the bar; at the same time he continually offered and withdrew a pie coveted by Simon, whose attention was divided between the pie and the scene behind him, at which he kept glancing over his shoulder, immediately turning back toward the pie as the Pie Man withdrew it, Simon all the time pretending to fumble in his pocket for a penny. The Pie Man was dressed like a French baker’s apprentice, in a white blouse and blue-and-white checked pants; he appeared to be about twenty-eight years of age. Simon was about the same age, but he was wearing a Buster Brown outfit, with a wide-brimmed hat, dark blue blazer and short pants, and a large red bow tie.
At the opposite end of the bar sat two young women, their backs to the audience, apparently engaged in conversation. The first, Polly Flinders, was wearing a strapless dress of ash-colored chiffon with a narrow silver belt. She sat closest to Jack Horner and Boy Blue, but paid no attention to them and turned frequently toward her companion, at the same time puffing on a cigarette in a shiny black cigarette holder and sipping a martini straight up with an olive. Daffy Down Dilly, the other young woman, had long straight blond hair which had obviously been brushed excessively so that it gleamed when it caught the light; it was several shades of blond in easily distinguishable streaks. She wore a long emerald-green velvet gown cut very low in back, and held up by glittering rhinestone straps; her yellow lace-edged petticoat hung down about an inch and a half below the hem of her gown. She did not smoke but from time to time sipped through a straw on a whiskey sour, also straight up. Although she frequently faced in the direction of the other characters when she turned toward Polly, she too paid them no mind.
After a few moments Jack seemed to grow weary of Boy Blue’s attentions and gave him a brisk shove which sent him sprawling on the floor, where he walked about on all fours barking like a dog for several minutes, causing the hyena in the bottom left tableau to stop its own prowling and fall silent except for an occasional whimper, as though wondering where the barking was coming from. Soon Boy Blue curled up in front of the bar and pretended to fall asleep, resting his head on the brass rail, and the hyena continued as before. Jack rearranged his clothing and turned toward the barman, who handed him another drink. At this point the statue of Mercury stepped from its pedestal and seemed to float upward into the bar scene, landing on tiptoe between Jack and Simple Simon. After a deep bow in the direction of the ladies, who ignored him, he turned to face the audience and delivered the following short speech.
“My fellow prisoners, we have no idea how long each of us has been in this town and how long each of us intends to stay, although I have reason to believe that the lady in green over there is a fairly recent arrival. My point, however, is this. Instead of loitering this way, we should all become part of a collective movement, get involved with each other and with our contemporaries on as many levels as possible. No one will disagree that there is much to be gained from contact with one another, and I, as a god, feel it even more keenly than you do. My understanding, though universal, lacks the personal touch and the local color which would make it meaningful to me.”
These words seemed to produce an uneasiness among the other patrons of the bar. Even Little Boy Blue stopped pretending to be asleep and glanced warily at the newcomer. The two girls had left off conversing. After a few moments Daffy got down off her bar stool and walked over to Mercury. Opening a green brocade pocketbook, she pulled out a small revolver and shot him in the chest. The bullet passed through him without harming him and imbedded itself in the fish in the mural behind the bar, causing it to lurch forward regurgitating blood and drop the envelope, which produced a loud report and a flash like a magnesium flare that illuminated an expression of anger and fear on Alice’s face, as she hastily clapped her hands over her ears. Then the whole stage was plunged in darkness, the last thing remaining visible being the apparently permanent smile on Mercury’s face—still astonished and delighted, and bearing no trace of malice.
Little by little the darkness began to dissipate, and a forest scene similar to that in the mural was revealed. It had moved forward to fill the space formerly occupied by the bar and its customers, and was much neater and tidier than the forest in the mural had been. The trees were more or less the same size and shape, and planted equidistant from each other. There was no forest undergrowth, no dead leaves or rotting tree trunks on the ground; the grass under the trees was as green and well kept as that of a lawn. This was because the scene represented a dream of Mania (whose grotto was still visible in the lower left-hand corner of the stage), and, since she was the goddess of confusion, her dream revealed no trace of confusion, or at any rate presented a confusing absence of confusion. On a white banner threaded through some of the branches of the trees in the foreground the sentence “It’s an Ongoing Thing” was printed in scarlet letters. To the left, toward the rear of the scene, Alice appeared to be asleep at the base of a tree trunk, with a pig dressed in baby clothes asleep in her lap. An invisible orchestra in the pit intoned the “March” from Grieg’s
Sigurd Jorsalfar.
A group of hobos who had previously been hidden behind the trees moved to the center of the stage and began to perform a slow-moving ballet to the music. Each was dressed identically in baggy black-and-white checked trousers held up by white suspenders fastened with red buttons, a crumpled black swallowtail coat, red flannel undershirt, brown derby hat and white gloves with black stripes outlining the contours of the wrist bones, and each held in his right hand an extinguished cigar butt with a fat gray puffy ash affixed to it. Moving delicately on point, the group formed an ever-narrowing semicircle around Alice and the sleeping pig, when a sudden snort from the latter startled them and each disappeared behind a tree. At this moment Mania emerged from her grotto dressed in a gown of sapphire-blue tulle studded with blue sequins, cradling a sheaf of white gladioli in the crook of one arm and with her other hand holding aloft a wand with a gilt cardboard star at its tip. Only her curiously unkempt hair marred the somewhat dated elegance of her toilette. Deftly detaching the hyena’s chain from its post, she allowed the beast to lead her upward to the forest scene where the hobos had each begun to peek out from behind his tree trunk. Like the Wilis in
Giselle,
they appeared mesmerized by the apparition of the goddess, swaying to the movement of her star-tipped wand as she waved it, describing wide arcs around herself. None dared draw too close, however, for if they did so the snarling, slavering hyena would lurch forward, straining at its chain. At length she let her wand droop toward the ground, and after gazing pensively downward for some moments she raised her head and, tossing back her matted curls, spoke thus: