Novelty Love Trot

American Poetry Review, The, Nov/Dec 2004 by Ashbery, John

I enjoy biographies and bibliographies,

and cultural studies. As for music, my tastes

run to Liszt's Consolations, especially the flatter ones,

though I've never been consoled

by them. Well, once maybe.

As for religion, it's about going to hell,

isn't it? I read that 30% of Americans believe in hell,

though only one percent thinks they'll end up there,

which says a lot about us, and about the other religions.

Nobody believes in heaven. Hell is what gets them fired up.

I'm probably the only American

who thinks he's going to heaven, though my reasons

would be hard to explain. I enjoy seasons

and picnicking. A waft from a tree branch

and I'm in heaven, though not literally.

For that one must await the steep decline

into a declivity, and shouts from companions

who are not far off.

In the end it matters little what things we enjoy.

We list them, and barely have we begun

when the listener's attention has turned to something else.

"Did you see that? The way that guy cut him off?"

Darlings, we'll all be known for some detail,

some nick in the chiseled brow, but it won't weigh much

in the scale's careening pan. What others think

of us is the only thing that matters,

to us and to them. You are stuffing squash blossoms

with porcini mushrooms. I am somewhere else, alone as usual.

I must get back to my elegy.

JOHN ASHBERY'S most recent book is Selected Prose (University of Michigan Press, 2004). His next volume of poems, Where Shall I Wander, is forthcoming in 2005. He is Charles P. Stevenson, Jr., Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College.