Behind the lace of their aspiring
Opinions. And heaven will not care,
To raise our love
In scathing hymns. So beware and
Bye now. The jewels are for luck.
The Pied Piper
Under the day’s crust a half-eaten child
And further sores which eyesight shall reveal
And they live. But what of dark elders
Whose touch at nightfall must now be
To keep their promise? Misery
Starches the host’s one bed, his hand
Falls like an axe on her curls:
“Come in, come in! Better that the winter
Blaze unseen, than we two sleep apart!”
Who in old age will often part
From single sleep at the murmur
Of acerb revels under the hill;
Whose children couple as the earth crumbles
In vanity forever going down
A sunlit road, for his love was strongest
Who never loved them at all, and his notes
Most civil, laughing not to return.
Answering a Question in the Mountains
I
I went into the mountains to interest myself
In the fabulous dinners of hosts distant and demure.
The foxes followed with endless lights.
Some day I am to build the wall
Of the box in which all angles are shown.
I shall bounce like a ball.
The towers of justice are waving
To describe the angles we describe.
Oh we have been so far
To instruct the birds in our cold ways.
Near me I heard a sound,
The line of a match struck in care.
It is late to be late.
II
Let us ascend the hearts in our hearts.
Let us ascend trees in our heads,
The dull heads of trees.
It is pain in the hand of the ungodly
To witness all the sentries,
The perfumed toque of dawn,
The hysteric evening with empty hands.
The snow creeps by; many light years pass.
We see for the first time.
We shall see for the first time.
We have seen for the first time.
The snow creeps by; many light years pass.
III
I cannot agree or seek
Since I departed in the laugh of diamonds
The hosts of my young days.
A Pastoral
Perhaps no vice endears me to the showboat,
Whose license permeates our deep south.
The shows are simple, not yet easy, with handsome
And toy horns trying tried and true melodies.
Silently, that vice might speak from the shade:
“Your capers have misdirected all your animals.”
But, hating and laughing, risen with animals,
Who is denied admission to the showboat?
Nevertheless, because of tomorrow’s shade
The lad intends to file with the green deep south.
His ankles seek the temple melodies.
His mischief stirs the rocks and keeps them handsome.
Tomorrow, finding him less handsome,
From the corral the melodies
Would start, teaching the showboat
(Thick is the tambour, oversold the deep south)
Which flowers to press back into the shade.
My affairs wrapped in shade,
Myself shall mobilize that handsome
Energetic enemy of the deep south.
Lately worms have pestered the animals.
Alarmed at our actions, a glittering showboat
Fled from the glade of supposed melodies.
And no more in our society living melodies
Break forth under the little or no shade.
The days are guarded. A miserable showboat
Plies back and forth between the handsome
Rocks, unwatched by animals
Whose glistening breath wakens forgetfulness of the deep south.
Truly the lesson of the deep south
Is how to avoid lingering beyond melodies
That cleave to the heart before it learns what animals
Strangers are. Knowing shade
Is their apology, let us never excuse handsome
Terror, the crook’d finger of a disappearing showboat.
The psalmist thought the deep south a wonderful showboat
And to the animals he met in the shade
Said, “You are my melodies, and you are handsome.”
Le livre est sur la table
I
All beauty, resonance, integrity,
Exist by deprivation or logic
Of strange position. This being so,
We can only imagine a world in which a woman
Walks and wears her hair and knows
All that she does not know. Yet we know
What her breasts are. And we give fullness
To the dream. The table supports the book,
The plume leaps in the hand. But what
Dismal scene is this? the old man pouting
At a black cloud, the woman gone
Into the house, from which the wailing starts?
About the Author
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
978-1-4804-5946-5
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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