Read Online Flow Chart: A Poem by John Ashbery - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: John Ashbery
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jewels.
Or a foray into the unexplained outside. We can never have tears enough,
in fact, so why regret the sun’s pointing
these acerated surfaces? Once, a whale will be kind, and no other grief can exist after
that. You just have to choose, making sure all the choices are wrong, and the sky then
of your own privacy caves in on you, collapses, is comfortable as sleep. In that distant
forest nothing can live separate, and it’s a dream. A difficulty. For one.
For one exchanging one neutral memory for another.
And one fans out over the abyss. This is spring, the warning:
herring may never happen again, and if one gray suit bulges before your eyes be sure
to take it in again: others may be found wanting, the gold rush having resumed, and operas
are once again in demand. By the time I got to the movies it was incredibly
quiet in the dark, only birds peeped, the silent man turned, and the chrome angle
of one’s glasses inaccurately suggested the thirties to legions half-ignorant of their own
birthplaces, let alone metal screening. One has done so much for others; must it be?
No hint of lavender, of cirrus, of citrus? No but the lemmings trot back, you can see for yourself
how much potential was invested there, and what came of it.
It’s time to swing out on one’s own and, if perennial pathos isn’t your dish,
make a stew of something else—nimbus, or limbo. Anything so long as it’s not caused by neighbors
whose potential for wrecking your life is greater now than at any point in the future
provided you let them get away with it and are not angry to relinquish
the paws that go on escaping. Talk it over with your gardener, see
the bright shoots, forget that you will live long, that all thrives, apace and at the same rate.
Or bright facets could interrupt, reflectors
left out on lawns not live to see the dawning of new, earthen flowers
and yet be called to resume again, for dull
is not dull enough and we wish these stones to have duration even as fatigue palls
on the island in the sunset,
and flamingos fall over each other in the luxury of getting away.
I would assemble
landscapes from insect-tunneled wood and go live in a hole somewhere
lest pleasant anomalies impose bumptious charades promoting peace to others and to all comers,
seal it in a chest, rip it open, scatter the powder of life on the dead sawdust
to watch it blink, and then pound with my fists as hard as I can on the saga of
the sheepgirl and her friend the pelican merchant: how they became friends long after
ceasing to know each other, when both were blind and living in unfatally dingy
circumstances somewhere near Clapham Common: when autumn flickers, curves in
on the unfinished lunch, may it rest established early. To graduate
from sultry “other woman” parts to hell itself, which is infinitely more far-reaching
and beautiful than you might ever imagine, isn’t the first step,
but something more like the emerging at the top of the monument, that lets you see
in the vastest if not the least clotted vistas and places
no value-judgment on your being there, on the fact of your being there, though
it might if you weren’t alone, innocent
as a lintel. Back into the past, they sob, the others; it’s necessary in order to
flush out the present as it were, yet one can’t envy them the pained, coming-apart-in-high-velocity-winds feeling
or be surprised that one’s reassurances are ignored. That would belong to an earlier
grand idea of the importance of one’s actions, while now
almost any input is suspect, even the most cost-efficient, so that it seems other men’s
gardens get all the moisture and sunlight. We on the other hand have
only sterile notions of staying included to ruffle through, and one never tires
of this retrograde motion, even as one fears the consequences of standing still
and becoming like an old chromo on a wall.
And yet, dozens
of others experience it, no stigma is attached, only
Or a foray into the unexplained outside. We can never have tears enough,
in fact, so why regret the sun’s pointing
these acerated surfaces? Once, a whale will be kind, and no other grief can exist after
that. You just have to choose, making sure all the choices are wrong, and the sky then
of your own privacy caves in on you, collapses, is comfortable as sleep. In that distant
forest nothing can live separate, and it’s a dream. A difficulty. For one.
For one exchanging one neutral memory for another.
And one fans out over the abyss. This is spring, the warning:
herring may never happen again, and if one gray suit bulges before your eyes be sure
to take it in again: others may be found wanting, the gold rush having resumed, and operas
are once again in demand. By the time I got to the movies it was incredibly
quiet in the dark, only birds peeped, the silent man turned, and the chrome angle
of one’s glasses inaccurately suggested the thirties to legions half-ignorant of their own
birthplaces, let alone metal screening. One has done so much for others; must it be?
No hint of lavender, of cirrus, of citrus? No but the lemmings trot back, you can see for yourself
how much potential was invested there, and what came of it.
It’s time to swing out on one’s own and, if perennial pathos isn’t your dish,
make a stew of something else—nimbus, or limbo. Anything so long as it’s not caused by neighbors
whose potential for wrecking your life is greater now than at any point in the future
provided you let them get away with it and are not angry to relinquish
the paws that go on escaping. Talk it over with your gardener, see
the bright shoots, forget that you will live long, that all thrives, apace and at the same rate.
Or bright facets could interrupt, reflectors
left out on lawns not live to see the dawning of new, earthen flowers
and yet be called to resume again, for dull
is not dull enough and we wish these stones to have duration even as fatigue palls
on the island in the sunset,
and flamingos fall over each other in the luxury of getting away.
I would assemble
landscapes from insect-tunneled wood and go live in a hole somewhere
lest pleasant anomalies impose bumptious charades promoting peace to others and to all comers,
seal it in a chest, rip it open, scatter the powder of life on the dead sawdust
to watch it blink, and then pound with my fists as hard as I can on the saga of
the sheepgirl and her friend the pelican merchant: how they became friends long after
ceasing to know each other, when both were blind and living in unfatally dingy
circumstances somewhere near Clapham Common: when autumn flickers, curves in
on the unfinished lunch, may it rest established early. To graduate
from sultry “other woman” parts to hell itself, which is infinitely more far-reaching
and beautiful than you might ever imagine, isn’t the first step,
but something more like the emerging at the top of the monument, that lets you see
in the vastest if not the least clotted vistas and places
no value-judgment on your being there, on the fact of your being there, though
it might if you weren’t alone, innocent
as a lintel. Back into the past, they sob, the others; it’s necessary in order to
flush out the present as it were, yet one can’t envy them the pained, coming-apart-in-high-velocity-winds feeling
or be surprised that one’s reassurances are ignored. That would belong to an earlier
grand idea of the importance of one’s actions, while now
almost any input is suspect, even the most cost-efficient, so that it seems other men’s
gardens get all the moisture and sunlight. We on the other hand have
only sterile notions of staying included to ruffle through, and one never tires
of this retrograde motion, even as one fears the consequences of standing still
and becoming like an old chromo on a wall.
And yet, dozens
of others experience it, no stigma is attached, only
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