Authors: John Ashbery
Sharpest and most full. It’s a trance.
Obviously the guts and beauty are going to be denied again
This time around, as we all meet at twilight
In a level place surrounded by tall trees. It’s another kind of contest.
Whatever is sworn, promised, sealed
With kisses, over and over, is as strange, faithless
And fundamentally unlike us as the ocean when it fills
Deep crevices far inland, more deeply involved with the land
Than anyone suspected. Such are our games,
And so also the way we thought of them
In the time behind the telling. Now it goes smoothly
Under glass. The contours and color contrasts are
Sharper, but there is no sound. And I didn’t deliberately
Try to hide my ambition, wearing the same tweed jacket
For the fourteenth season; instead I thought its pedigree something
To notice. But the question of style has been
Turned inside out in the towns where we never meet.
I lived so long without being scolded that I grew
To feel I was beyond criticism, until I flew
Those few paces from the nest. Now, I understand,
My privilege means giving up all claims on life
As the casual, criminal thing it sometimes is, in favor of
A horizon in whose cursive recesses we
May sometimes lie concealed because we are part
Of the pattern. No one misses you. The future
Ignores those streaming with a present so heavy
And intense we are subdued by the outline.
No one criticizes us for lacking depth,
But the scandal shimmers, around and elsewhere.
If we could finally pry open the gate to the pastures of the times,
No sickness would be evident. And the colors we adduced
Would supply us, parables ourselves, told in our own words.
must never be
invented.
It shall have been.
Once its umbrella of truth is raised to become
And tall trees follow it as though it were Orpheus,
Its music, in trouble, slows down to a complete standstill,
Still in trouble but has become a cube
With all the outside faces reflecting
What we did before we got here. One of us,
A little poorer than the others, half-turns
To divulge a truth in low relief that another
Messenger would have been killed for: it isn’t
Our waiting that makes us worthy of having been here forever,
Only the wild groves you read about, that no one
Has probably ever seen. I hear they have caves
In which men as old as the earth live, that when
These die, nothing ever takes their place.
Therefore, why weep we, mourners, around
A common block of space?
The cross-hatching technique which allowed our ancestors to exchange certain genetic traits for others, in order to provide their offspring with a way of life at once more variegated and more secure than their own, has just about run out of steam and has left us wondering, once more, what there is about this plush solitude that makes us think we will ever get out, or even want to. The ebony hands of the clock always seem to mark the same hour. That is why it always seems the same, though it is of course changing constantly, subtly, as though fed by an underground stream. If only we could go out in back, as when we were kids, and smoke and fool around and just stay out of the way, for a little while. But that’s just it—don’t you see? We are “out in back.” No one has ever used the front door. We have always lived in this place without a name, without shame, a place for grownups to talk and laugh, having a good time. When we were children it seemed that adulthood would be like climbing a tree, that there would be a view from there, breathtaking because slightly more elusive. But now we can see only down, first down through the branches and further down the surprisingly steep grass patch that slopes away from the base of the tree. It certainly is a different view, but not the one we expected.
What did
they
want us to do? Stand around this way, monitoring every breath, checking each impulse for the return address, wondering constantly about evil until necessarily we fall into a state of torpor that is probably the worst sin of all? To what purpose did they cross-hatch so effectively, so that the luminous surface that was underneath is transformed into another, also luminous but so shifting and so alive with suggestiveness that it is like quicksand, to take a step there would be to fall through the fragile net of uncertainties into the bog of certainty, otherwise known as the Slough of Despond?
Probably they meant for us to enjoy the things they enjoyed, like late summer evenings, and hoped that we’d find others and thank them for providing us with the wherewithal to find and enjoy them. Singing the way they did, in the old time, we can sometimes see through the tissues and tracings the genetic process has laid down between us and them. The tendrils can suggest a hand, or a specific color—the yellow of the tulip, for instance—will flash for a moment in such a way that after it has been withdrawn we can be sure that there was no imagining, no auto-suggestion here, but at the same time it becomes as useless as all subtracted memories. It has brought certainty without heat or light. Yet still in the old time, in the faraway summer evenings, they must have had a word for this, or known that we would someday need one, and wished to help. Then it is that a kind of purring occurs, like the wind sneaking around the baseboards of a room: not the infamous “still, small voice” but an ancillary speech that is parallel to the slithering of our own doubt-fleshed imaginings, a visible soundtrack of the way we sound as we move from encouragement to despair to exasperation and back again, with a gesture sometimes that is like an aborted movement outward toward some cape or promontory from which the view would extend in two directions—backward and forward—but that is only a polite hope in the same vein as all the others, crumpled and put away, and almost not to be distinguished from any of them, except that
it knows we know,
and in the context of not knowing is a fluidity that flashes like silver, that seems to say a film has been exposed and an image will, most certainly will, not like the last time, come to consider itself within the frame.
It must be an old photograph of you, out in the yard, looking almost afraid in the crisp, raking light that afternoons in the city held in those days, unappeased, not accepting anything from anybody. So what else is new? I’ll tell you what is: you are accepting this now from the invisible, unknown sender, and the light that was intended, you thought, only to rake or glance is now directed full in your face, as it in fact always was, but you were squinting so hard, fearful of accepting it, that you didn’t know this. Whether it warms or burns is another matter, which we will not go into here. The point is that you are accepting it and holding on to it, like love from someone you always thought you couldn’t stand, and whom you now recognize as a brother, an equal. Someone whose face is the same as yours in the photograph but who is someone else, all of whose thoughts and feelings are directed at you, falling like a gentle slab of light that will ultimately loosen and dissolve the crusted suspicion, the timely self-hatred, the efficient cold directness, the horrible good manners, the sensible resolves and the senseless nights spent waiting in utter abandon, that have grown up to be you in the tree with no view; and place you firmly in the good-natured circle of your ancestors’ games and entertainments.
Imagine some tinkling curiosity from the years back—
The fashions aren’t old enough yet to look out of fashion.
It is a picture of patient windows, with trees
Of two minds half-caught in their buzz and luster,
The froth of everyone’s ideas as personal and skimpy as ever.
The windows taught us one thing: a great, square grief
Not alleviated or distracted by anything, since the pattern
Must establish itself before it can grow old, cannot weather nicely
Keeping a notion of squirrels and peacocks to punctuate
Chapters of fine print as they are ground down, growing ever finer
To assume the strict title of dust someday. No, there is no room now
For oceans, blizzards: only night, with fingers of steel
Pressing the lost lid, searching forever unquietly the mechanism
To unclasp all this into warbled sunlight, the day
The gaunt parson comes to ask for your hand. Nothing is flying,
Sinking; it is as though the resistance of all things
To the earth were so much casual embroidery, years
In the making, barely glimpsed at the appointed time.
Through it all a stiffness persists
Of someone who had changed her mind, moved by your arguments
And waiting till the last possible moment to confess it,
To let you know you were wanted, even a lot, more than you could
Imagine. But all that is, as they say, another story.
Rough stares, sometimes a hello,
A something to carry. Yes and over it
The feeling of one to one like leaves blowing
Between this imaginary, real world and the sky
Which is sometimes a terrible color
But is surely always and only as we imagine it?
I forgot to say there are extra things.
Once, someone—my father—came to me and spoke
Extreme words amid the caution of the time.
I was too drunk, too scared to know what was being said
Around us then, only that it was a final
Shelving off, that it was now and never,
The way things would come to pass.
You can subscribe to this.
It always lets you know how well
You’re doing, how well along the thing is with its growing.
Was it a pattern of wheat
On the spotted walls you wanted to show me
Or are these the things always coming,
The churning, moving support that lets us rock still?
To pass through pain and not know it,
A car door slamming in the night.
To emerge on an invisible terrain.
So the luck of speaking out
A little too late came to be worshipped in various guises:
A mute actor, a future saint intoxicated with the idea of martyrdom;
And our landscape came to be as it is today:
Partially out of focus, some of it too near, the middle distance
A haven of serenity and unreachable, with all kinds of nice
People and plants waking and stretching, calling
Attention to themselves with every artifice of which the human
Genre is capable. And they called it our home.
No one came to take advantage of these early
Reverses, no doorbell rang;
Yet each day of the week, once it had arrived, seemed the threshold
Of love and desperation again. At night it sang
In the black trees:
My mindless, oh my mindless, oh.
And it could be that it was Tuesday, with dark, restless clouds
And puffs of white smoke against them, and below, the wet streets
That seem so permanent, and all of a sudden the scene changes:
It’s another idea, a new conception, something submitted
A long time ago, that only now seems about to work
To destroy at last the ancient network
Of letters, diaries, ads for civilization.
It passes through you, emerges on the other side
And is now a distant city, with all
The possibilities shrouded in a narrative moratorium.
The chroniqueurs who bad-mouthed it, the honest
Citizens whose going down into the day it was,
Are part of it, though none
Stand with you as you mope and thrash your way through time,
Imagining it as it is, a kind of tragic euphoria
In which your spirit sprouted. And which is justified in you.
In the haunted house no quarter is given: in that respect
It’s very much business as usual. The reductive principle
Is no longer there, or isn’t enforced as much as before.
There will be no getting away from the prospector’s
Hunch; past experience matters again; the tale will stretch on
For miles before it is done. There would be more concerts
From now on, and the ground on which a man and his wife could
Look at each other and laugh, remembering how love is to them,
Shrank and promoted a surreal intimacy, like jazz music
Moving over furniture, to say how pleased it was
Or something. In the end only a handshake
Remains, something like a kiss, but fainter. Were we
Making sense? Well, that thirst will account for some
But not all of the marvelous graffiti; meanwhile
The oxygen of the days sketches the rest,
The balance. Our story is no longer alone.
There is a rumbling there
And now it ends, and in a luxurious hermitage
The straws of self-defeat are drawn. The short one wins.
One idea is enough to organize a life and project it
Into unusual but viable forms, but many ideas merely
Lead one thither into a morass of their own good intentions.
Think how many the average person has during the course of a day, or night,
So that they become a luminous backdrop to ever-repeated
Gestures, having no life of their own, but only echoing
The suspicions of their possessor. It’s fun to scratch around
And maybe come up with something. But for the tender blur
Of the setting to mean something, words must be ejected bodily,
A certain crispness be avoided in favor of a density
Of strutted opinion doomed to wilt in oblivion: not too linear
Nor yet too puffed and remote. Then the advantage of
Sinking in oneself, crashing through the skylight of one’s own