John Ashbery [Ashbery - Rivers and Mountains

Worse than the sunflower, she had said. But the new dimension of truth had only recently Burst in on us. Now it was to be condemned. And in vagrant shadow her mothball truth is eaten. In cool, like-it-or-not shadow the humdrum is consumed. Tired housewives begat it some decades ago, A small piece of truth that if it was honey to the lips Was also millions of miles from filling the place reserved for it.

You see how honey crumbles your universe Which seems like an institutionhow many walls? Then everything, in her belief, was to be submerged And soon. There was no life you could live out to its end And no attitude which, in the end, would save you. The monkish and the frivolous alike were to be trapped in deaths capacious claw But listen while I tell you about the wallpaper There was a key to everything in that oak forest But a sad one. Ever since childhood there Has been this special meaning to everything. You smile at your friends joke, but only later, through tears. For the shoe pinches, even though it fits perfectly.

Apples were made to be gathered, also the whole host of the worlds ailments and troubles. There is no time like the present for giving in to this temptation. Tomorrow youll weepwhat of it? There is time enough Once the harvest is in and the animals put away for the winter To stand at the uncomprehending window cultivating the desert With salt tears which will never do anyone any good. My dearest I am as a galleon on salt billows. Perfume my head with forgetting all about me. For some day these projects will return.

The funereal voyage over ice-strewn seas is ended. You wake up forgetting. Already Daylight shakes you in the yard. The hands remain empty. They are constructing an osier basket Just now, and across the sunlight darkness is taking root anew In intense activity. You shall never have seen it just this way And that is to be your one reward.

Fine vapors escape from whatever is doing the living. The night is cold and delicate and full of angels Pounding down the living. The factories are all lit up, The chime goes unheard. We are together at last, though far apart.

Perhaps we ought to feel with more imagination. As today the sky 70 degrees above zero with lines falling The way September moves a lace curtain to be near a pear, The oddest device cant be usual.

And that is where The pejorative sense of fear moves axles. In the stars There is no longer any peace, emptied like a cup of coffee Between the blinding rain that interviews. You were my quintuplets when I decided to leave you Opening a picture book the pictures were all of grass Slowly the book was on fire, you the reader Sitting with specs full of smoke exclaimed How it was a rhyme for brick or redder. The next chapter told all about a brook. You were beginning to see the relation when a tidal wave Arrived with sinking ships that spelled out Aladdin. I thought about the Arab boy in his cave But the thoughts came faster than advice.

If you knew that snow was a still toboggan in space The print could rhyme with fallen star.

Keeping warm now, while it lasts In the life we must suppose, continuance Quickens the scrap which falls to us. Painless rigors, like thistledown, Strapped to us like a heavy pack The massed air hanging above. The tether of you to this bank To understand the flesh left splinters. Depths of understanding preside Shelving steeply into a kind of flow Stumble happily as through a miracle Opening around you Pinned to the moment. Your eyes reflect a hunting scene.

A promise of so much that is to come, Extracted, accepted gladly But within its narrow limits No knowledge yet, nothing which can be used. You are grateful for the imaginary pause. No one had imagined that the storm would be like this To discover its heart. The blind enemy Exalting the possibility of defeat Behind glass first unthinkable then not so much It would be better if one smile The one successful day drew darkness from the folds around it. Meadows then might melt into something For play, the necessity gone. But your Idea is not continuinga swift imperfect Condensation of the indifference you feel To be the worn fiber and bone which must surround you For the permanence of whats already happened in you.

Blackness plays no part; the eye Is black but there is no depth. It is the surface black which attacks the shape, Bending it to present uses. The face on the door a hundred million years old Slightly smaller than real life To accept the cold air and bread And cause, in the distance, an old satisfaction. Their simplest construction rising slowly toward Your neutral ceiling in which are capsized Forever afternoon smells and rich zero disturbance As you unharness the horse moves slowly back Changing too the position escapes you mild and drawn And prisons think restlessly shifting There are ever new arrivals New standard of living and expunging With a shout something youd rather have These equators fixed youd esteemed The discovery Only lacking to fail eagerly The approach of the cool marble subject An aphrodisiac in its tall gray flowering Into separate lengths later lost Brought down with it hesitancy The bent clouds arrow and rutted woods. At Pine Creek imitation the circle Had swallowed the useless mystery again As clouds reappear after rains.

Yes, they are alive and can have those colors, But I, in my soul, am alive too.

I feel I must sing and dance, to tell Of this in a way, that knowing you may be drawn to me. And I sing amid despair and isolation Of the chance to know you, to sing of me Which are you. You see, You hold me up to the light in a way I should never have expected, or suspected, perhaps Because you always tell me I am you, And right. The great spruces loom. I am yours to die with, to desire. I cannot ever think of me, I desire you For a room in which the chairs ever Have their backs turned to the light Inflicted on the stone and paths, the real trees That seem to shine at me through a lattice toward you.

If the wild light of this January day is true I pledge me to be truthful unto you Whom I cannot ever stop remembering. Remembering to forgive. Remember to pass beyond you into the day On the wings of the secret you will never know. Taking me from myself, in the path Which the pastel girth of the day has assigned to me. I prefer you in the plural, I want you, You must come to me, all golden and pale Like the dew and the air.

Hasnt the sky? Returned from moving the other Authority recently dropped, wrested as much of That severe sunshine as you need now on the way You go. Hasnt the sky? Returned from moving the other Authority recently dropped, wrested as much of That severe sunshine as you need now on the way You go.

The reason why it happened only since You woke up is letting the steam disappear From those clouds when the landscape all around Is hilly sites that will have to be reckoned Into the total for there to be more air: that is, More fitness read into the undeduced result, than land. This means never getting any closer to the basic Principle operating behind it than to the distracted Entity of a mirage. The half-meant, half-perceived Motions of fronds out of idle depths that are Summer. And expansion into little draughts. The reply wakens easily, darting from Untruth to willed moment, scarcely called into being Before it swells, the way a waterfall Drums at different levels. Each moment Of utterance is the true one; likewise none are true, Only is the bounding from air to air, a serpentine Gesture which hides the truth behind a congruent Message, the way air hides the sky, is, in fact, Tearing it limb from limb this very moment: but The sky has pleaded already and this is about As graceful a kind of non-absence as either Has a right to expect: whether its the form of Some creator who has momentarily turned away, Marrying detachment with respect, so that the pieces Are seen as parts of a spectrum, independent Yet symbolic of their staggered times of arrival; Whether on the other hand all of it is to be Seen as no luck.

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