like a barrel choked with leaves. Yet sooner or later,
you know, one is dipped in it
and spotted lawns, greatcoats emerge.
The cistern really was built
by the workmen while you were away.
It’s alive and containing.
And so many horticulturalists sway,
inebriated with the hardiness
of the ranunculus, the gladiolus.
Even so, he asked us to leave him
alone, at night, wanted to think
or something, about love or something,
something that turned him on.
Only later when we came to bask
in his friendship, did that marine eye astonish us:
Out over so much plains, such doo-wop wind,
you’d think it wouldn’t spell “ceremonial” to him.
But he merely shaved the numbers off, dawn removed
the fingerprints, and why I am with you
and these several elves, no one can piece together:
not Great-aunt Josephine or her mortician boyfriend,
not the robbers of the “School of Night” drawing.
And we shifted, you and I, causing the rowboat to take on water.
Strange, how a few decibels can make your day.
X
Of course some of us were more risible—then.
Stopping by an apartmentful of freeloaders
on a snowy evening, I was asked about the other
mysteries, and, forced to prevaricate, noted
that time was setting in.
As one gets peeled away from life
and distant waterspouts put their kibosh on the horizon,
just one message makes it through the triple filters:
Go easy. Your chums on this shore have
worked long and hard on the inclined-plane thing;
if you haven’t any suggestions (and you haven’t),
let them continue to think it was sorcery
that was lacking. The fact that no directional
arrows pointed the way to the mother lode
proves their greenery to them, and they begin
to reason: “The kitchen’s not such a bad place,
if it’s sinks you’re after. Sure, Caruso was singing
somewhere behind the padlocked velvet door,
but if we stay—no, linger—here, the problem
will reverse itself. Tom and Jerrys all around.”
As for the ritual endowment
so prized by the Coca-Cola girl, that only arrived later
to prove its wetness and wildness non-fatal
just before the sun came out and caked it.
We sure live in a bizarre and furious
galaxy, but now it’s up to us to make it
into an environment for maps to sidle up to,
as trustingly as leeches. Heck, put us
on the map, while you’re at it.
That way we can smoke a cigarette, and stay and sway,
shooting the breeze with night and her swift promontories.
XI
“But in the soul of man there are innumerable infinities.”
—THOMAS TRAHERNE
There is still another thing I have to do.
I’ve never been able to do this
and I have this announcement to make
over all the streets, all the years we have been difficult
leading to this. This icon. That walks and jabbers
fortuitously or not. Bells splinter the ice
and am away, on a trip somewhere. Kansas.
It doesn’t matter for me
and matters so old for you, sobs distant as tractors.
We are the people we came to see
or might as well be, bringing cabbages as gifts,
talking nonstop, barbed wire stringing the trees,
cigar smoke bellowing.
It was all the same to us,
we came in and out,
were thoughtful as strawberries, and the great athlete overturned us,
made us obsolete. Now that was a day I can trace
with a little mental calisthenics
and find I know what I was doing, to whom
I spoke, the kings, carriages, it was all there.
And my knowing derives no comfort
from that parallel shelving of events.
No kind of nexus. As if the doll herself knew
what you weren’t supposed to know, and survived the fall
from the attic window to incriminate you,
just before the draft swept her into the furnace.
The burning is beginning again.
But there are a giant two of us,
the remnant, or product, or a complex
bristling-up-around, then a feigning of disinterest
in a corner of the room, and the fuse ignites
the furniture with blue. It’s earth-shattering, they say,
as long as you contain it,
and you have to, can. The brain-alarm is being recalled
but the message exists even with no words to inflict it,
no stanzas to be cherished. For we end
as we are forgiven, with chords the bird promised
caught in our throats, O sweetest song,
color of berries, that I lied for and extended
improbably a little distance from the given grave.
XII
A late glimmer read into it
what is not to be intuited,
only pressed, like a hand or pants,
as the sea presses against rock
for lack of anything
better to do—surrounded by buddies
taking a breather, it was always thus with you,
you who come close enough to me:
Oh, you’ve often found
clues in the garden where the hornets
and the robins make their nests;
and the garage with its enormous drums.
Say something that will strengthen me,
let me sip all the colas of the world
before I dive off this reef, into
that region of ferns and bubbles that awaits us,
where all are not so bright, but a few are.
These we clasp to us, our bodies’ tattoos
seeking psychiatric help, and the earth
guzzles and slurps rhythmically.
A dog would like you for it,
but here no voice says to come all the way in.
Here are holdings,
taking name in the urban dusk
that grazed you just now. Have you brought the lesson?
Good, I was sure of it. But can no longer
go out past the doorman. Here, take this basket of iced cookies
anyway. And he jubilates. Everything is in time for him,
eating in the capacity, along with the French
and motorcycle community, is what the headphones told us.
And when we no longer have each other to look at
these buzz and resonate still. From what dark pitcher
or mirror I brought you, from Duluth, and minus
astral influences, you are grateful, and for wrappings in general.
It is time to feast
so soon again.
Slow crows still rally round that puncture mark
in a Danish heaven where a sawhorse delivers
the belated aspirin and spools are wound
in the interests of a greater clarity than this:
Soon, all will be hidden,
like a stage behind a red velvet curtain,
and this mole on your shoulder—no need to ask
it its name. In the brisk concealment
that has become general everything thrives:
bushes, lampposts, motels at the edge of airports
whose blue lights guide the descending vehicle
to a safe berth in soon-to-be night,
as wharves welcome their vessels, however frumpy
they may seem, with open arms.
And I think it says a lot about us, about
our welcoming, that days don’t disturb themselves
or think too much about it, or manage
the disheveled trace that was to have been our signature.
We’re too cagey for that in any case,
wouldn’t be fooled by the most elaborately duplicated passport,
bill of lading. It’s as though we’ve come refreshed
from another planet, and spied immediately what was lacking in this one:
an orange, fresh linens, ink, a pen.
Still, the hothouse beckons.
I’ve told you before how afraid this makes me,
but I think we can handle it together,
and this is as good a place as any
to unseal my last surprise: you, as you go,
diffident, indifferent, but with the sky for an awning
That’s what I meant by “get a handle,” and as I say it,
both surface and subtext subside quintessentially
and the dead-letter office dissolves in the blue acquiescence of spring.
XIII
You get hungry,
you eat hot.
Home’s a cold delivery destination.
The emphatic nose puts it on hold.
Clubs are full.
I kind of like the all-night dust-up
though I’m sworn to secrecy,
with or without a cat.
I let so many people go by me
I sort of long for one of them, any
one, to turn back toward me,
forget these tears. As children we played at being grownups.
Now there’s trouble brewing on the horizon.
So—if you want to come with me,
or just pull at my sleeve, let them make that discovery.
Summer won’t end in your lap,
nor are the stars more casual than usual.
Peace, quiet, a dictionary—it was so important,
yet at the end nobody had any time for any of it.
It was as if all of it had never happened,
my shoelaces were untied, and—am I forgetting anything?
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.
The author gratefully acknowledges the following publications in which poems in And the Stars Were Shining first appeared: American Poetry Review, Chelsea, Colorado Review, Conjunctions, Forbes, Grand Street, Harvard Review, Lingo, Mudfish, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, PN Review, Partisan Review, Poetry (Chicago), The Poetry Society, Princeton Library Chronicle, St. Mark’s Newsletter, and The Times Literary Supplement.
Copyright © 1994 by John Ashbery
Cover design by Mimi Bark
978-1-4804-5907-6
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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