Read Your Name Here: Poems Online
Authors: John Ashbery
Your Name Here: Poems (12 page)
That watery light, so undervalued
except when evaluated, which never happens
much, perhaps even not at all—I intend to conserve it
somehow, in a book, in a dish, even at night,
like an insect in a light bulb.
Yes, day may just be breaking. The importance isn’t there
but in the beautiful flights of the trees
accepting their own flaccid destiny,
or the tightrope of seasons.
We get scared when we look at them up close
but the king doesn’t mind. He has the tides to worry about,
and how fitting is the new mood of contentment
and how long it will wear thin.
I looked forward to seeing you so much
I have dragged the king from his lair: There,
take that, you old wizard. Wizard enough, he replies,
but this isn’t going to save us from the light
of breakfast, or mend the hole in your stocking.
“Now wait”—and yet another day has consumed itself,
brisk with passion and grief, crisp as an illustration in a magazine
from the thirties, when we and this light were all that mattered.
But how can I be in this bar and also be a recluse?
The colony of ants was marching toward me, stretching
far into the distance, where they were as small as ants.
Their leader held up a twig as big as a poplar.
It was obviously supposed to be for me.
But he couldn’t say it, with a poplar in his mandibles.
Well, let’s forget that scene and turn to one in Paris.
Ants are walking down the Champs-Elysées
in the snow, in twos and threes, conversing,
revealing a sociability one never supposed them as having.
The larger ones have almost reached the allegorical statues
of French cities (is it?) on the Place de la Concorde.
“You see, I told you he was going to bolt.
Now he just sits in his attic
ordering copious
plats
from a nearby restaurant
as though God had meant him to be quiet.”
“While you are like a portrait of Mme de Staël by Overbeck,
that is to say a little serious and washed out.
Remember you can come to me anytime
with what is bothering you, just don’t ask for money.
Day and night my home, my hearth are open to you,
you great big adorable one, you.”
The bar was unexpectedly comfortable.
I thought about staying. There was an alarm clock on it.
Patrons were invited to guess the time (the clock was always wrong).
More cheerful citizenry crowded in, singing the Marseillaise,
congratulating each other for the wrong reasons, like the color
of their socks, and taking swigs from a communal jug.
“I just love it when he gets this way,
which happens in the middle of August, when summer is on its way
out, and autumn is still just a glint in its eye,
a chronicle of hoar-frost foretold.”
“Yes and he was going to buy all the candy bars in the machine
but something happened, the walls caved in (who knew
the river had risen rapidly?) and one by one people were swept away
calling endearing things to each other, using pet names.
‘Achilles, meet Angus.’” Then it all happened so quickly I
guess I never knew where we were going, where the pavement
was taking us.
Things got real quiet in the oubliette.
I was still reading
Jean-Christophe.
I’ll never finish the darn thing.
Now is the time for you to go out into the light
and congratulate whoever is left in our city. People who survived
the eclipse. But I was totally taken with you, always have been.
Light a candle in my wreath, I’ll be yours forever and will kiss you.
John Ashbery was born in 1927 in Rochester, New York, and grew up on a farm near Lake Ontario. He studied English at Harvard and at Columbia, and along with his friends Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch, he became a leading voice in what came to be called the New York School of poets. Ashbery’s poetry collection
Some Trees
was selected by W. H. Auden as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize in 1955—the first of over twenty-five critically admired works Ashbery has published in a career spanning more than six decades. His book
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
(1975) received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award, and since then Ashbery has been the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a National Humanities Medal, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and a Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other honors.
For years, Ashbery taught creative writing at Brooklyn College and Bard College in New York, working with students and codirecting MFA programs while continuing to write and publish award-winning collections of poetry—all marked by his signature philosophical wit, ardent honesty, and polyphonic explorations of modern language. His most recent book of poems is
Quick Question
, published in 2012. He lives in New York.
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The author gratefully acknowledges the following publications in which poems in
Your Name Here
first appeared, sometimes in slightly different form:
American Poetry Review, Café Review, Colorado Review, Combo, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Fence, The Germ, Harvard Review, The Hat, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Kunapipi, Lingo, The London Review of Books, murmur, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Ohio Review, The Paris Review, PN Review, Stand, The Times Literary Supplement, Verse, The World,
and
Birthday Boy: A Present for Lee Harwood.
“Frogs and Gospels” was commissioned by the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities as part of their program
Humanities in Comparative, Historical Perspective
.
“Who Knows What Constitutes a Life” was first published as a chapbook by Z Press with artwork by Elizabeth Murray.
Copyright © 2000 by John Ashbery
cover design by Mimi Bark
978-1-4804-5944-1
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA
