John Ashbery: Fifteen poems

American Poetry Review, The, Jan 1995 by Ashbery, John

or no one quite remembered it. It should be here,

somewhere...

In these demotic times one is grateful for a variety

of sundries: footprints on the prow of a ship,

or a wolf taking the trouble to cross over and tell you

he's engaged. Sunny things, the fins and buttons of childhood,

passing through grace and out of it.

One finds there is time, after all, to wind the clock.

Yet no one noticed it had stopped. Would it make

the afternoon editions, blowing like mold across the blue

canyons we call our trellis, causing alembics to explode

in carnival sheds? What about next time? Could we eliminate it

from the list of essentials taxpayers pray for,

then shrink from, noticing it reflected in the rainbarrel

when all the other dimensions remain quietly on hold?

Perhaps, on some more sophisticated planet,

these things tow the gravity they require,

and people are no match for them, don't even envy

or imagine them. Everything proceeds from a simple

gesture that never goes out of style. Yoo hoo. Look, it's Clara

and Amos. Aren't they simply divine? But it is getting late,

and I have to get up and chop wood tomorrow. Oh, if you're looking

for a timetable, it's there, in that train, that's now

two feet away, now one, but will never obstruct

or demolish us. Thank heaven for Zeno's paradox!

HEGEL

Like a coffee table, the chair slides

across the polished floor--its aides have brushed its sides

again. How it shines! Hugs are interspersed with kisses;

the scrofulous interfaces with the electric clock.

It certainly is midnight

and for once it was early.

She said she had "dishpan hands"--no one

quite understood what she was talking about, yet issues

were skirted, no questions raised. Now when a peacock

stares out of the barnyard, no one mistakes it for a Christmas tree ornament,

goes up to it and says, I liked you better in felt,

or was it at the Rangoon racetrack? But a bird

always has the last word.

MY NAME IS DIMITRI

I am going to be your host tonight.

Do you wish the fiddle or the fish?

The hen with ivory sauce is very fine, very light.

An experience unlike any other pushes you

toward what holy extremities? To a margin of uncertainty

where not just drinks are muddled and an old frump

of a past straddles you. Uncertainty polishes the china

to a mirror-like daze.

A World War I soldier wants to say Thank you,

fuck you, from all the trenches his heart is bleeding

from, from the aghast question and the problem of novelty

to the tip of sores that ends this peninsula

back where it began, where the pilgrims trod.

There is so much in Warsaw-

too many restaurants, too few connections

that would otherwise make things interesting.

We have nothing to cling to, only torn memories

of a station between stations that wasn't

the one that was supposed to be there. An altar of roses

climbed halfway up the stadium, which was full of misfits

with no store to come home to. Still, there was the bus,

a place beyond all others, curdled in the neat sky.

An insane child wishes the grass whipped less

at the bends where the posts are. The merger of innocents