John Ashbery - Hotel Lautréamont

FOR PIERRE Dear ghost, what shelter in the noonday crowd? Im going to write an hour, then read what someone else has written. Youve no mansion for this to happen in. But your adventures are like safe houses, your knowing where to stop an adventure of another order, like seizing the weather. We too are embroiled in this scene of happening, and when we speak the same phrase together: We used to have one of those, it matters like a shot in the dark. One of us stays behind. One of us advances on the bridge as on a carpet.

Lifeits marvelous follows and falls behind.

When I last saw you, in a hurry to get back and stuff, we wore tape measures and the kids could go to the movies. I loomed in that background. The old man looked strangely at the sea. Always feet come knocking at the door and when it isnt that, its something or other melancholy. There is always someone who will find you disgusting.

I love to tear you away from most interests with besotted relish, and we talked to each other. Worked before, itll work this time. Look for the strange number at number seven. You see I need a reason to go down to the sea in ships again. How does one do that? The old man came back from looking at it his replies were facile. Rubber snake or not, my most valued fuchsia sputtered in the aquarium, at once all shoulders began to support me.

We were travelling in an inn. You were going to make what design an apple? Then the hotel people liked us so, it could have been before a storm, I lie back and let the wind come to me, and it does, something I wouldnt have thought of. We can take our meals beside the lake balustrade. Something either does or will not win the evidence hidden in this case. The plovers are all overmake that lovers, after all they got their degrees in law and medicine, no one will persist in chasing them in back lots, the sanded way I came through here once. These days the old man often coincides with me; his remarks have something playful and witty about them, though they do not hold together.

And I, I too have something to keep from him: something no one must know about. Im sure theyll think were ready now. We arent, you know. An icebox grew there once. Hand me the chatter and Ill fill the plates with cookies, for they can, they must, be passed.

Its one thing to get them to admit it, quite another to get soap in your eye.

As long as I can remember I have been cared for, stricken, like that. No one seems to scold. I have had so many identity crises in the last fifty years you wouldnt believe it. Suffice it to say I am well, if you like peacocks feathers on pianos and cars racing their motors, waiting for dates who never get done with doing their hair. There have been so many velocipedes, millipedes, and other words that Im token senseless. Just bring me one more drop of the elixir: thats all I ask.

But when you saw how many colors things come in it was going to be a long rest of the day. Enjoy your afternoon, he said, and it was roses that you never get enough of and they make you sick. It was kind of a cable from which depended seven-branched candelabra and feathers on the pine trunks in that witch wood where nobody was supposed to stay say, do you think I could? Smell the roses? Live like it was time? Lo, it is time. He raised the horn to his lips. Such an abundance ofdo you mind if I stay, stay overnight? For the plot of a morrow is needed to sort out the pegs in, meanwhile enough of me lasts to give us the old semblance of a staring, naked truth, with drinks, that we wanted, right? And because a gray dustman slips by unnoticed, a thousand cathartic things begin to happen. Only we know nothing of these.

Nothing can take their place. Today I squeezed a few more drops of color hoping to blot you out, your face I mean, and then this extraordinarily tall caller asked if this was something I usually did. Do I work against the plait often? And sure, his boots were the right size. I replaced my little brush and with it the thought of your coming to absent me after dust and bougainvillea had chimed. The answer was a nut. And then there are so many harridans all over the wall one is encouraged not toward a strict accounting of all that is taking place, and we have washed, we are nice for now.

And the bowsprit (a word I have never understood) comes undone, comes all over me, washes my pure identity from mehelp! In the meantime your friend has tunnelled even as far as us, and it gets to be cold and damp because the days are no longer making sense, are coming unlocked in the tin aviary where we pinned them, and no one right now has any good to say about what temperature clashes with what other kind statistic we were all against when it came out but who remembers that now? Who was even engaged when we first thought of that? Ill bite your toes, see you in the morning. Place the canopy on that old chest allowing for a few grunts and drizzles, please, and not another word of what you spoke to your father.

Where are you? Where you are is the one thing I love, yet it always escapes me, like the lilacs in their leaves, too busy for just one answer, one rejoinder. The last time I see you is the first commencing of our time to be together, as the light of the days remains the same even as they grow shorter, stepping into the harness of winter. Between watching the paint dry and the grass grow I have nothing too tragic in tow. I have this melting elixir for you, front row tickets for the concert to which all go.

I ought to chasten my style, burnish my skin, to get that glow that is all-important, so that some may hear what I am saying as others disappear in the confusion of unintelligible recorded announcements. A great many things were taking place that day, besides, it was not the taxpayers who came up to me, who were important, but other guests of the hotel some might describe as dog-eared, apoplectic. Measly is a good word to describe the running between the incoming and the outgoing tide as who in what narrow channels shall ever afterwards remember the keen sightings of those times, the reward and the pleasure. Soon it was sliding out to sea most naturally, as the place to be. They never cared, nor came round again. But in the tent in the big loss it was all right too.

Besides, were not serious, I should have added.

Seen on a bench this morning: a man in a gray coat and apple-green tie. He couldnt have been over fifty, his mild eyes said, and yet there was something of the ruthlessness of extreme old age about his bearing; I dont know what. In the corner a policeman; next, sheaves of wheat laid carefully like dolls on the denuded sward, prompting me to wish of dreaming you again. After the station we never made significant contact again. But its all right, isnt it, I mean the telling had to be it.

There was such fire in the way you put your finger against your nostril as in some buried sagas erupts out at one sometimes: the power that is under the earth, no I mean in it. And if all the disappointed tourists hadnt got up and gone away, we would still be in each others reserve, aching, and that would be the same, wouldnt it, as far as the illustrations and the index were concerned? As it is I frequently get off before the stop that is mine not out of modesty but a failure to keep the lines of communication open within myself. And then, unexpectedly, I am shown a dog and asked to summarize its position in a few short, angular adverbs and tell them this is what they do, why we cant count on anything unexpected. The waterfall is all around us, we have been living in it, yet to find the hush material is just what these daily exercises force on us. I mean the scansions of tree to tree, of house to house, and how almost every other one had something bright to add to the morass of conversation: not much, just a raised eyebrow or skirt. And we all take it in, even laughing in the right places, which get to be few and far between.

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