Wakefulness: Poems (7 page)

Go blow. Tremble. Decipher. Mix and match.

Maybe. We’ll see.

I see and hear the wind.

It is unreceived. Clouds flee backwards.

I think myself into a stupor.

Once upon a time everybody was here.

Then the pellets started to go.

They move and move little,

like my brother or childhood,

or a little schoolhouse

near the zoo, boarded up with directions

to some other telltale structure, crusted

with scaffolding like frosting on winter’s cake,

to tell you, go through, go through now,

die and formally die.

Yet autumn stays sequestered

and likes it. In that period

some people still came to visit, with nothing

on their minds, no reason, not even liking you.

A lot of autos stormed the site

of the one pine’s expiration, breathing, asking

for you. Some said you had gone,

but you were hiding under the porch, stung

with remorse. Now this person

comes and says have you seen the shed,

it gives me goose bumps, and I, stuck as always on

which word should be the first, but comes out

in no particular order, volunteer my notes on the

time we sat with woodpeckers on the

various counterpane and had a swig—

when you were, I mean, on the fence,

just inside, talking the way people in dreams

talk to those who are awake, subverting the last

ditch of defense in time for what

takes it away …

The light of late afternoon

chiseled the sea and barracks, but who

was keeping count? There were more tourists

than usual that day, the town seemed to run away from them

as we approached them, wondering what was wrong, what was the matter

with the bland corpses they had come to see name

something we ourselves couldn’t see for being in it

as mute pedestrians moved to adjourn it.

I’ve seen it before, I’ve seen it in the street:

These various resolutions fade in and out,

plaiting a track on the texture of day,

a legacy of distant effort, wispy

and traditional, like dads and moms coming off

the assembly line. But they never get that right.

I just said goodbye.

As a fish spoils

in a time of truce, so these galoshes go

hopping over sidewalk and snowbank, not really knowing

to whose destiny we are being summoned

or what happens after that.

As time spoils,

it may have known what it was doing

but decided not to do anything about it, so everything is lost,

wrapped in a landfill. It could be caviar

or the New York
Daily News.

After all,
I
come next,

he said, am a cruel object like all the torsos

you unbuttoned all over your previous life, scant in comparison

to this one, and I said, go ahead and quit clowning

if you like that game, but

leave me beside myself,

like a kid next to a lamppost. Okay, what gain

in not replying? What capitalist system do you think this is? Surely

it’s late capitalism, by which I mean not to go

yet and peace undermines

the uproar we all made

about it, and you are positively put on hold

again. I like the mouse in this turmoil, not exactly purring

adroitly, not seeming to conjugate the

avalanche of fear.

Now when Norsemen

(or some substitute) tumble out of the north, sifting

down over our busy, shuttered, dignified street with hints of the Azores,

there’s no untangling the knots we put there before

and paused to identify

as the four winds rushed

in and purified the place of partnerships,

fanning overhead, a-bristle with doodads, chafing at every chime

from every earnest steeple, coughing too much.

The little guy was

impatient, was serious,

every time a blow fell adjured another conspirator,

and so, when it got quite dark we became an outing, another

quilting-bee disaster. And if it tried too far

there was always salt to rub

in wounds to be licked.

The tea is too hot.

The curtain in the window blew around

Rind rotting on brown chairs.

In the valley of bartenders the one-eyed stooge is king.

What I’m doing now is write.

That’s the real stuff.

It doesn’t work!

I got a card from him yesterday I could ask Dick.

What is the fresh approach?

Your mini body coming unto me, unshelled

as peace pavanes no one undertakes,

not without a woofing in the chest-o-ciser,

two strokes and it’s gone.

You owed the fresh kind.

Why yes. Remember

me? Remember me

in any case.

(a cento)

Within a windowed niche of that high hall

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.

I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street

Hard by yon wood, now smiling as in scorn.

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks

From camp to camp, through the foul womb of night.

Come, Shepherd, and again renew the quest.

And birds sit brooding in the snow.

Continuous as the stars that shine,

When all men were asleep the snow came flying

Near where the dirty Thames does flow

Through caverns measureless to man,

Where thou shalt see the red-gilled fishes leap

And a lovely Monkey with lollipop paws

Where the remote Bermudas ride.

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me:

This is the cock that crowed in the morn.

Who’ll be the parson?

Beppo! That beard of yours becomes you not!

A gentle answer did the old Man make:

Farewell, ungrateful traitor,

Bright as a seedsman’s packet

Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles.

Obscurest night involved the sky

And brickdust Moll had screamed through half a street:

“Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been,

Sylvan historian, who canst thus express

Every night and alle,

The happy highways where I went

To the hills of Chankly Bore!”

Where are you going to, my pretty maid?

These lovers fled away into the storm

And it’s O dear, what can the matter be?

For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple bells they say:

Lay your sleeping head, my love,

On the wide level of a mountain’s head,

Thoughtless as monarch oaks, that shade the plain,

In autumn, on the skirts of Bagley Wood.

A ship is floating in the harbour now,

Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!

It was another era, almost another century,

I was going to say. The saint wept quietly

in her ebony pew. It was the thing to do.

Then garlands of laughter, studded with cloves and lemons,

joined the standing figures with their distant nimbi.

Inexplicably, all was well for a time.

Soon, discordant echoes reined in the heyday:

It was love, after all,

that everybody was talking about

and nobody gave a shit for.

But why am I telling
you
about all this, who wrote the book,

who stamped his initials in the fairway

for all blokes to see? And if it only came

down to this smidgen, would apes and penguins be any wiser

for all the tunnels of love we shuffled through,

scared by skeletons, by bats, at every turning

of our loose-leafed trajectory through shallow water?

Only when the iodine sunset

bleeds again against red day, will all children

get permission to go out where the grass is short,

where the absent-minded postman leaves earnests of his passing

from this day to the next, where the eaves are clipped

close to the houses. Five days from the last clerestory

your ambiance drained into the pockmarked shutters.

Obviously the jig was up. What’s that? Whose jig? O I can see clear

ahead into the flying; the poor don’t talk much about it,

but her apron is ambrosial with trellised stars,

her stance stares down even the most unquiet,

and on days like this you ride free.

There was such numismatics in his pocket

as only jitterbugs in cyberspace could conjugate

while from fate’s awning the diamond drip descended, bigger

than both of us, big as all outdoors.

Abruptly, unassertively, the year starts,

as freeways close and roofs collapse,

and all kinds of incidents give nervure to the map:

a stitch in time, a local hero here,

boys falling in tune with the ageless argument.

So out of the turquoise turmoil a name

implodes like a star, having made its point.

And the seasons, welcome as you know,

are seen packing it in. Maybe add some rust

at a crucial jointure, no? But who am I

to be telling you your business. Next, young and beautiful,

emerging from a door, casting your essence

along the face of today’s precipice, you see “there’s no tomorrow,”

only avatars waiting in the wings, more or less patiently.

This is what it takes for you to do what’s best,

covering all the exits.

Oh, there is a danger there?

Who would have thought it in today’s heat?

But on the other hand, why just be standing

while its morose page rolls over,

an encumbrance to all, not just ourselves?

And when twilight licks appreciatively at the sky,

your answer will be there in the circuitry,

not bypassed. For you to hold,

to genuflect with.

A shadow of a flagon crossed your face:

The cease-fire is improving?

And in this starting to be in something, what had the older

children been doing? Taking lessons still to be paid for,

impinging on what comes next. Comes now.

Soon there is something to be said for everything,

he said, whiplash, whippets; why even my identity

is strange to me now, a curiosity. When someone comes later,

who will I be talking with? The erroneous vision

made no mention of this. Its conquering agenda is complete,

and we, of course, are incomplete, destined to ourselves

and its fitful version of eternity:

the one with chapter titles.

More worldliness to celebrate. And yet, someone

will take it from you, needy thing.

Weather drips quietly through the skeins

in my diary. What surly elision is this?

Who faxed the folks news of my homecoming,

even unto the platform number? The majestic parlor car

slides neatly into its berth, the doors fly open,

and it’s Jean and Marcy and all the kids, waving pink plastic pinwheels,

chomping on popcorn. Ngarrrh. You know I adore ceremony,

even while refusing to stand on it, but this, this is too inane.

And the cold anonymity of the station takes over,

reins in the crowds that were sifting to the furthest exits. No one is here.

Now I know why I’ve always hated the tango, yet loved the intimacy

secreted in its curls. And for this to continue, we’ve got to

get together, renew old saws, let old grudges ride …

Later I’m posting this to you.

I just thought of you, you see, as indeed I do

several million times a day. I need your disapproval,

can’t live without your churlish ways.

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.

The author gratefully acknowledges the following publications in which poems in
Wakefulness
first appeared:
Boston Review, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Grand Street, Jacket, London Review of Books, The New Republic, The New Yorker, PN Review, Poetry, Poetry Review, Salt, The Times Literary Supplement,
and
Yale Review

Copyright © 1998 by John Ashbery

Cover design by Mimi Bark