John Ashbery - And the Stars Were Shining

After ten years, my lamp expired. At first I thought there wasnt going to be any more this. In the convenience store of spring I met someone who knew someone I loved by the dairy case. All ribbons parted on a veil of musicks, wherein unwitting orangutans gambled for socks, and the tasseled enemy was routed. Up in one corner a plaid puff of smoke warned mere pleasures away. We were getting on famouslylike houses on fire, I believe the expression is.

At midterm I received permission to go down to the city. There, in shambles and not much else, my love waited. It was all too blissful not to take in, a grand purgatorial romance of kittens in a basket. And with that we are asked to be pure, to wash our hands of stones and seashells my poster plastered everywhere. When two people meet, the folds can fall where they may.

Havent you arrived yet? A sleepiness of doing dissolved my one scruple: I lay on the concrete belvedere section belabored by sun. Havent you arrived yet? A sleepiness of doing dissolved my one scruple: I lay on the concrete belvedere section belabored by sun.

Nuts convened in the chancel, a posse wheezed by in some oater: Chapter I, etc. In the past I was bitten. Now I believe. Nothing is better than nothing at all. Winter. Mice sleep peacefully in their dormers.

The old wagon gets through; the parcel of contraband is noted: a brace of ibex horns, a scale worshipfully sung at the celesta. We know nothing about anything. The wind pours through us as through a bag of horse chestnuts. Speak. The orderly disappeared down the hall. For a long time a sound of ferns rallied, then nothing, only dumb snapshots of unknown corners in strange cities.

The tedious process of fitting endings to stories. Ground review. An obscurantists trick. Once youve wheedled as many as are there at a given time, theres a certainty of dawn in the not-much-else-colored sky. A phone booth pivots daintily in air. O crawl back to the peach ladder.

A comic-book racetrack breathes somewhere. A pianola was offered: astonishment on the third floor. The nice whore mended her ways. The breathing came fast and thick. The ushers will please take their seats.

Voices of Spring.

Vienna Bonbons. Morning Papers. Visiting Firemen. Mourning Polka. Symphonie en ut dise majeur. Fog-soaked Extremities. Agrippine. Agrippine.

Nelly and All. The Day the Coast Came to Our House. Hocus Focus. Unnatural Dreams. The Book of Five-Dollar Poems. Oaks and Craters.

Robert, a Rhapsody. Cecilia Valds. The Jewish Child. Mandarin Sorcerers. The Readers Digest Book of Posh Assignations. The Penguin Book of Thwarted Lovers.

The American Screwball Comedy. Scenes of Clerical Life. Incan Overtures. The House on 42nd Street. The Man in Between. The Man on the Box.

The Motor Car. Rue des Acacias. Elm Street and After. The Little Red Church. The Hotel District. Ill Eat a Mexican.

The Heritage of Froth. The Trojan Comedy. Water to the Fountain. Memoirs of a Hermit Crab. The Ostrich Succession. Exit Pursued by a Turkey.

In the Pound. The Artists Life. On the Beautiful Blue Danube. Less Is Roar. The Bicyclist.

Cool enough. Cool enough.

Granted, she has beautiful legs, you know. Mens thoughts are continually drawn behind the apron of her success, or to the tank top of her access to the secrets of the great and philosophic, of the most polite spirits that invest these semitropic airs. I need a tragic future to invest in. Getting no support from others, I wait, here it comes along the rails, a slow train from Podunk, the ironed faces of the passengers at each window expressing something precise but nothing in particular. Yes, the mooing woods around this station are partly extreme, and wire fences are deep within some parts of them.

This heart is useless.This heart is useless.

I must have another.
The Bride of Frankenstein I like napping in transit. What I ought to do just sits there. I like summerdoes it like me? So much cursory wind with things on its mind No time to worry about it now, itshesays. In short I like many dividers of the days that come near to eavesdrop on our thoughts. What about gliders? These, yes, I like these too. And greened copper things like things out of the thirties.

I must have oneno, make that a dozen, all wrapped fresh, at my address. And were it but a foozle schlepping round my ankles by golly Id give it the same treatment all those guys, years, gave me. You cant fasten a suspender stud and not know about it, how awful they looked, and when they returned home under trees nobody said anything, nobody wanted it. Still, Ill go out in my way, waiting for yet another vehicle. It seems strange I read this page before, no, this whole short story. And what sirens sing to me now, cover me with buttons?

Gracious exertor, but the rooms are small and mean and so papered over with secrets that even their shape is uncertain, but it is the shape of the past: no love, no extra credit, not even civility from those shades.

Do they even see you? They were so anxious for you to be there, once, in the playground of what was happening to them. Messages were bright then, hats undoffed, manners fresh and cool, like a seasonable day in early spring. The glancing rivulets in the gutters struck a note that was a trifle flint-like, though, and the birds were wary, warier than usual. It took a man with a cane to magnetize all those invisible and partly visible crosscurrents, reluctant, downright sullen, or ones that hadnt yet had the time to reflect on what was being set up here: a point, no more nor less. Instead of trying to kiss you, I too felt sucked into the ambient animal-revenge scene: By twos and threes the animals returned, to their cages, and sat obediently while the trainer barked orders at them. They, it seemed, had nothing to lose.

Nor in all the whitewashed domain of the present past tense was anyone privy to the secrets that now make us strong, or tall, and vulnerable as a bride left waiting at the church, inching backward to the cliffs edge as the photographer gets ready to smile.

Yes, but right reason dictates Yes, but the wolf is at the door, nor shall our finding be indexed. Yes, but life is a circus, a passing show wherein each may drop his reflection and so contradict the purpose of a maelstrom: the urge, the thrust. And if what others do finally seems good to you? Why, the very civility that gilded it is flaking. Passivity itselfs a hurdle. So, lost with the unclaimed lottery junk, uninventoried, you are an heir to anything.

Brightness of purpose counts: Centesimal victorious flunkeys seemed to grab its tail yet it defied them with invention. Stand up, and the rain will be cold at first in your pockets. Later, by chance, youll discover supper in the sparkling, empty tavern. A nice, white bed awaits you; your passports in there too.

Acts have been cleaned up. In the latest compromise the hip audience mostly understands.

Unpleasantness, strange blips arise, the nine-bathroom garage. But where are we to begin again, and what are we compared to Thee, as two men scuffle in a checkout line and a child bends into the light, her knowledge of innocence as a death now, name in the register a gloved hand signs? For what have we been rescued, if not to see these and other things that have no love for us? For relishing something once done in secret, and you lose footing further on, out of the frame, and everything that proves dimensionless is haggard.