Ashbery - The double dream of spring : poems

They are preparing to begin again: Problems, new pennant up the flagpole In a predicated romance. About the time the sun begins to cut laterally across The western hemisphere with its shadows, its carnival echoes, The fugitive lands crowd under separate names. It is the blankness that follows gaiety, and Everyman must depart Out there into stranded night, for his destiny Is to return unfruitful out of the lightness That passing time evokes. It was only Cloud-castles, adept to seize the past And possess it, through hurting. And the way is clear Now for linear acting into that time In whose corrosive mass he first discovered how to breathe. Just look at the filth youve made, See what youve done.

Yet if these are regrets they stir only lightly The children playing after supper, Promise of the pillow and so much in the night to come. I plan to stay here a little while For these are moments only, moments of insight, And there are reaches to be attained, A last level of anxiety that melts In becoming, like miles under the pilgrims feet.

The immense hope, and forbearance Trailing out of night, to sidewalks of the day Like air breathed into a paper city, exhaled As night returns bringing doubts That swarm around the sleepers head But are fended off with clubs and knives, so that morning Installs again in cold hope The air that was yesterday, is what you are, In so many phases the head slips from the hand. The tears ride freely, laughs or sobs: What do they matter? There is free giving and taking; The giant body relaxed as though beside a stream Wakens to the force of it and has to recognize The secret sweetness before it turns into life Sucked out of many exchanges, torn from the womb, Disinterred before completely deadand heaves Its mountain-broad chest. They were long in coming, Those others, and mattered so little that it slowed them To almost nothing. They were presumed dead, Their names honorably grafted on the landscape To be a memory to men.

Until today We have been living in their shell. Now we break forth like a river breaking through a dam, Pausing over the puzzled, frightened plain, And our further progress shall be terrible, Turning fresh knives in the wounds In that gulf of recreation, that bare canvas As matter-of-fact as the traffic and the days noise. The mountain stopped shaking; its body Arched into its own contradiction, its enjoyment, As far from us lights were put out, memories of boys and girls Who walked here before the great change, Before the air mirrored us, Taking the opposite shape of our effort, Its inseparable comment and corollary But casting us farther and farther out. Whawhat happened? You are with The orange tree, so that its summer produce Can go back to where we got it wrong, then drip gently Into history, if it wants to. A page turned; we were Just now floundering in the wind of its colossal death. And whether it is Thursday, or the day is stormy, With thunder and rain, or the birds attack each other, We have rolled into another dream.

No use charging the barriers of that other: It no longer exists. But you, Gracious and growing thing, with those leaves like stars, We shall soon give all our attention to you.

Silly girls your heads full of boys There is a last sample of talk on the outer side Your stand at last lifts to dumb evening It is reflected in the steep blue sides of the crater, So much water shall wash over these our breaths Yet shall remain unwashed at the end. The fine Branches of the fir tree catch at it, ebbing. Not on our planet is the destiny That can make you one. To be placed on the side of some mountain Is the truer story, with the breath only Coming in patches at first, and then the little spurt The way a steam engine starts up eventually.

The sagas purposely ignore how better off it was next day, The feeling in between the chapters, like fins. There is so much they must say, and it is important About all the swimming motions, and the way the hands Came up out of the ocean with original fronds, The famous arrow, the girls who came at dawn To pay a visit to the young child, and how, when he grew up to be a man The same restive ceremony replaced the limited years between, Only now he was old, and forced to begin the journey to the sun.

Barely tolerated, living on the margin In our technological society, we were always having to be rescued On the brink of destruction, like heroines in Orlando Furioso Before it was time to start all over again. There would be thunder in the bushes, a rustling of coils, And Angelica, in the Ingres painting, was considering The colorful but small monster near her toe, as though wondering whether forgetting The whole thing might not, in the end, be the only solution. And then there always came a time when Happy Hooligan in his rusted green automobile Came plowing down the course, just to make sure everything was O.K., Only by that time we were in another chapter and confused About how to receive this latest piece of information. Was it information? Werent we rather acting this out For someone elses benefit, thoughts in a mind With room enough and to spare for our little problems (so they began to seem), Our daily quandary about food and the rent and bills to be paid? To reduce all this to a small variant, To step free at last, minuscule on the gigantic plateau This was our ambition: to be small and clear and free.

Alas, the summers energy wanes quickly, A moment and it is gone. And no longer May we make the necessary arrangements, simple as they are. Our star was brighter perhaps when it had water in it. Now there is no question even of that, but only Of holding on to the hard earth so as not to get thrown off, With an occasional dream, a vision: a robin flies across The upper corner of the window, you brush your hair away And cannot quite see, or a wound will flash Against the sweet faces of the others, something like: This is what you wanted to hear, so why Did you think of listening to something else? We are all talkers It is true, but underneath the talk lies The moving and not wanting to be moved, the loose Meaning, untidy and simple like a threshing floor. These then were some hazards of the course, Yet though we knew the course was hazards and nothing else It was still a shock when, almost a quarter of a century later, The clarity of the rules dawned on you for the first time. They were the players, and we who had struggled at the game Were merely spectators, though subject to its vicissitudes And moving with it out of the tearful stadium, borne on shoulders, at last.

Night after night this message returns, repeated In the flickering bulbs of the sky, raised past us, taken away from us, Yet ours over and over until the end that is past truth, The being of our sentences, in the climate that fostered them, Not ours to own, like a book, but to be with, and sometimes To be without, alone and desperate. But the fantasy makes it ours, a kind offence-sitting Raised to the level of an esthetic ideal. These were moments, years, Solid with reality, faces, namable events, kisses, heroic acts, But like the friendly beginning of a geometrical progression Not too reassuring, as though meaning could be cast aside some day When it had been outgrown. Better, you said, to stay cowering Like this in the early lessons, since the promise of learning Is a delusion, and I agreed, adding that Tomorrow would alter the sense of what had already been learned, That the learning process is extended in this way, so that from this standpoint None of us ever graduates from college, For time is an emulsion, and probably thinking not to grow up Is the brightest kind of maturity for us, right now at any rate. And you see, both of us were right, though nothing Has somehow come to nothing; the avatars Of our conforming to the rules and living Around the home have madewell, in a sense, good citizens of us, Brushing the teeth and all that, and learning to accept The charity of the hard moments as they are doled out, For this is action, this not being sure, this careless Preparing, sowing the seeds crooked in the furrow, Making ready to forget, and always coming back To the mooring of starting out, that day so long ago.

Next page