Archibald MacLeish

Lines for a Prologue

These alternate nights and days, these seasons

Somehow fail to convince me. It seems

I have the sense of infinity!

(In your dreams, O crew of Columbus,

O listeners over the sea

For the surf that breaks upon Nothing—)

Once I was waked by the nightingales in the garden.

I thought, What time is it? I thought,

Time—Is it Time still?—Now is it Time?

(Tell me your dreams, O sailors:

Tell me, in sleep did you climb

The tall masts, and before you—)

At night the stillness of old trees

Is a leaning over and the inertness

Of hills is a kind of waiting.

(In sleep, in a dream, did you see

The world’s end? Did the water

Break—and no shore—Did you see?)

Strange faces come through the streets to me

Like messengers: and I have been warned

By the moving slowly of hands at a window.

Oh, I have the sense of infinity—

But the world, sailors, is round.

They say there is no end to it.

 

Archibald MacLeish

You, Andrew Marvell

And here face down beneath the sun

And here upon earth’s noonward height

To feel the always coming on

The always rising of the night:

To feel creep up the curving east

The earthy chill of dusk and slow

Upon those under lands the vast

And ever climbing shadow grow

And strange at Ecbatan the trees

Take leaf by leaf the evening strange

The flooding dark about their knees

The mountains over Persia change

And now at Kermanshah the gate

Dark empty and the withered grass

And through the twilight now the late

Few travelers in the westward pass

And Baghdad darken and the bridge

Across the silent river gone

And through Arabia the edge

Of evening widen and steal on

And deepen on Palmyra’s street

The wheel rut in the ruined stone

And Lebanon fade out and Crete

High through the clouds and overblown

And over Sicily the air

Still flashing with the landward gulls

And loom and slowly disappear

The sails above the shadowy hulls

And Spain go under and the shore

Of Africa the gilded sand

And evening vanish and no more

The low pale light across that land

Nor now the long light on the sea:

And here face downward in the sun

To feel how swift how secretly

The shadow of the night comes on ...

 

Allen Ginsberg

 Homework

Homage to Kenneth Koch 


If I were doing my Laundry I'd wash my dirty Iran 
I'd throw in my United States, and pour on the Ivory Soap, 
scrub up Africa, put all the birds and elephants back in 
the jungle, 
I'd wash the Amazon river and clean the oily Carib & Gulf of Mexico, 
Rub that smog off the North Pole, wipe up all the pipelines in Alaska, 
Rub a dub dub for Rocky Flats and Los Alamos, Flush that sparkly 
Cesium out of Love Canal 
Rinse down the Acid Rain over the Parthenon & Sphinx, Drain the Sludge 
out of the Mediterranean basin & make it azure again, 
Put some blueing back into the sky over the Rhine, bleach the little 
Clouds so snow return white as snow, 
Cleanse the Hudson Thames & Neckar, Drain the Suds out of Lake Erie 
Then I'd throw big Asia in one giant Load & wash out the blood & 
Agent Orange, 
Dump the whole mess of Russia and China in the wringer, squeeze out 
the tattletail Gray of U.S. Central American police state, 
& put the planet in the drier & let it sit 20 minutes or an 
Aeon till it came out clean

Allen Ginsberg

 

A Strange New Cottage in Berkeley 

All afternoon cutting bramble blackberries off a tottering brown
fence

under a low branch with its rotten old apricots miscellaneous under
the leaves,

 fixing the drip in the intricate gut machinery of a new toilet;
     found a good coffeepot in the vines by the porch, rolled a big tire out
of the scarlet bushes, hid my marijuana;
wet the flowers, playing the sunlit water each to each, returning for 
godly extra drops for the stringbeans and daisies;
three times walked round the grass and sighed absently:
my reward, when the garden fed me its plums from the form of a
small tree in the corner,

 an angel thoughtful of my stomach, and my dry and lovelorn tongue.

Allen Ginsberg

First Party At Ken Kesey's With Hell's Angels

Cool black night thru redwoods
cars parked outside in shade
behind the gate, stars dim above
the ravine, a fire burning by the side
porch and a few tired souls hunched over
in black leather jackets. In the huge
wooden house, a yellow chandelier
at 3 A.M. the blast of loudspeakers
hi-fi Rolling Stones Ray Charles Beatles
Jumping Joe Jackson and twenty youths
dancing to the vibration thru the floor,
a little weed in the bathroom, girls in scarlet
tights, one muscular smooth skinned man
sweating dancing for hours, beer cans
bent littering the yard, a hanged man
sculpture dangling from a high creek branch,
children sleeping softly in their bedroom bunks.
And 4 police cars parked outside the painted
gate, red lights revolving in the leaves.

Allen Ginsberg

                                    with Peter Orlovsky, Brendan Behan (1960)

                                    photograph by Richard Avedon

A Supermarket in California

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.
         In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
         What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!—and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

         I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
         I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
         I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
         We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

         Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
         (I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.)
         Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely.
         Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
         Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?
 

Berkeley, 1955

James Merrill

 

Voices from the Other World

Presently at our touch the teacup stirred,   

Then circled lazily about

From A to Z. The first voice heard

(If they are voices, these mute spellers-out)   

Was that of an engineer

Originally from Cologne.

Dead in his 22nd year

Of cholera in Cairo, he had KNOWN

NO HAPPINESS. He once met Goethe, though.   

Goethe had told him: PERSEVERE.

Our blind hound whined. With that, a horde   

Of voices gathered above the Ouija board,   

Some childish and, you might say, blurred   

By sleep; one little boy

Named Will, reluctant possibly in a ruff

Like a large-lidded page out of El Greco, pulled   

Back the arras for that next voice,   

Cold and portentous: ALL IS LOST.

FLEE THIS HOUSE. OTTO VON THURN UND TAXIS.   

OBEY. YOU HAVE NO CHOICE.

Frightened, we stopped; but tossed

Till sunrise striped the rumpled sheets with gold.

Each night since then, the moon waxes,   

Small insects flit round a cold torch

We light, that sends them pattering to the porch . . .

But no real Sign. New voices come,

Dictate addresses, begging us to write;

Some warn of lives misspent, and all of doom   

In ways that so exhilarate

We are sleeping sound of late.

Last night the teacup shattered in a rage.   

Indeed, we have grown nonchalant

Towards the other world. In the gloom here,   

our elbows on the cleared

Table, we talk and smoke, pleased to be stirred

Rather by buzzings in the jasmine, by the drone

Of our own voices and poor blind Rover’s wheeze,   

Than by those clamoring overhead,

Obsessed or piteous, for a commitment

We still have wit to postpone

Because, once looked at lit

By the cold reflections of the dead

Risen extinct but irresistible,

Our lives have never seemed more full, more real,   

Nor the full moon more quick to chill.

James Merrill

 In the Dark

Come, try this exercise:
Focus a beam,
Emptied of thinking, outward through shut eyes
On X, your “god” of long ago.

Wherever he is now the photons race,
A phantom, unrelenting stream,

For nothing lights up. No
Sudden amused face,
No mote, no far-out figment to obstruct
The energy—
                            It just spends
And spends itself, and who will ever know

Unless he felt you aim at him, and ducked

Or you before the session ends
Begin to glow

 

James Merrill

The Mad Scene 

  

Again last night I dreamed the dream called Laundry. 

In it, the sheets and towels of a life we were going to share, 

The milk-stiff bibs, the shroud, each rag to be ever 

Trampled or soiled, bled on or groped for blindly, 

Came swooning out of an enormous willow hamper 

Onto moon-marbly boards. We had just met. I watched 

From outer darkness. I had dressed myself in clothes 

Of a new fiber that never stains or wrinkles, never 

Wears thin. The opera house sparkled with tiers 

And tiers of eyes, like mine enlarged by belladonna, 

Trained inward. There I saw the cloud-clot, gust by gust, 

Form, and the lightning bite, and the roan mane unloosen. 

Fingers were running in panic over the flute’s nine gates. 

Why did I flinch? I loved you. And in the downpour laughed 

To have us wrung white, gnarled together, one 

Topmost mordent of wisteria, 

As the lean tree burst into grief.

John Ashbery

 

Memories of Imperialsm

        Dewey took Manila
	and soon after invented the decimal system
	that keeps libraries from collapsing even unto this day.
	A lot of mothers immediately started naming their male offspring “Dewey,”
	which made him queasy.  He was already having second thoughts about imperialism.
	In his dreams he saw library books with milky numbers
	on their spines floating in Manila Bay.
	Soon even words like “vanilla” and “mantilla” would cause him to vomit.
	The sight of a manila envelope precipitated him
	into his study, where all day, with the blinds drawn,
	he would press fingers against temples, muttering “What have I done?”
	all the while.  Then, gradually, he began feeling a bit better.
	The world hadn’t ended.  He’d go for walks in his old neighborhood,
	marveling at the changes there, or at the lack of them.  “If one is
	to go down in history, it is better to do so for two things
	rather than one,” he would stammer, none too meaningfully.
	 
        One day his wife took him aside
	in her boudoir, pulling the black lace mantilla from her head
	and across her bare breasts until his head was entangled in it.
	“Honey, what am I supposed to say?” “Say nothing, you big boob
	Just be glad you got away with it and are famous.”  Speaking of
	boobs…” “Now you’re getting the idea.  Go file those books
	on those shelves over there.  Come back only when you’re finished.”
	 
        To this day schoolchildren wonder about his latter career
	as a happy pedant, always nice with children, thoughtful
	toward their parents.  He wore a gray ceramic suit
	walking his dog, a “bouledogue,” he would point out.
	People would peer at him from behind shutters, watchfully,
	hoping no new calamities would break out, or indeed
	that nothing more would happen, ever, that history had ended.
	Yet it hadn’t, as the admiral himself
	would have been the first to acknowledge.

John Ashbery

Two Sonnets

from The Tennis Court Oath (1962)

                              I. DIDO
	 
        The body’s products become
	Fatal to it.  Our spit
	Would kill us, but we
	Die of our heat.
	Though I say the things I wish to say
	They are needless, their own flame conceives it.
	So I am cheated of perfection.
	 
                              II. THE IDIOT
	 
        O how this sullen, careless world
	Ignorant of me is!  These rocks, those homes
	Know not the touch of my flesh, now is there one tree
	Whose shade has known me for a friend.
	I’ve wandered the wide world over.
	No man I’ve known, no friendly beast
	Has come and put its nose into my hands.
	No maid has welcomed my face with a kiss.
	 
        Yet once, as I took passage
	From Gibraltar to Cape Horn
	I met some friendly mariners on the boat
	And as we struggled to keep the ship from sinking
	The very waves seemed friendly, and the sound
	The pray made as it hit the front of the boat.

John Ashbery

Strange Occupations

from Your Name Here (2000)

        Once after school, hobbling from place to place,
	I remember you liked the dry kind of cookies
	with only a little sugar to flavor them.
	 
        I remember that you liked Wheatena.
	You were the only person I knew who did.
	Don’t you remember how we used to fish for kelp?
	Got to the town with the relaxed, suburban name,
	Remembering how trees were green there,
	Greener than a sudden embarrassed lawn in April.
	How we would like to live there,
	and not in a different life, either.  We sweltered
	along in our union suits, past signs marked “Answer”
	and “Repent,” and tried both, and other things.
	 
        Then—surprise!  Velvet daylight
	came along to back us up, providing the courage
	that was always ours, had we but
	known how to access it downstairs.
	We used to crawl to so many events together: a symphony
	of hogs in a lilac tree, and other, possibly even more splendid,
	things until the eyelid withdrew. 
	 
        Now I can sample your shorts.
	So much more is there for us now—
	runnels that threaten to drown the indifferent one
	who sticks his toe in them.
	Much, much more light.
	 
        To whose office shall we go tomorrow?
	I’d like to hear the new recording of clavier
	variations.  Oh, help us someone!
	Put out the night and the fire, whose backdraft
	is even now humming her old song of antipathies.

John Ashbery

Mixed Feelings

from Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975)

        A pleasant smell of frying sausages
	Attacks the sense, along with an old, mostly invisible
	Photograph of what seems to be girls lounging around
	An old fighter bomber, circa 1942 vintage.
	How to explain to these girls, if indeed that’s what they are,
	These Ruths, Lindas, Pats and Sheilas
	About the vast change that’s taken place
	In the fabric of our society, altering the texture
	Of all things in it?  And yet
	They somehow look as if they knew, except
	That it’s so hard to see them, it’s hard to figure out
	Exactly what kind of expressions they’re wearing.
	What are your hobbies, girls?  Aw nerts,
	One of them might say, this guy’s too much for me.
	Let’s go on and out, somewhere
	Through the canyons of the garment center
	To a small café and have a cup of coffee.
	I am not offended that these creatures (that’s the word)
	Of my imagination seem to hold me in such light esteem,
	Pay so little heed to me.  It’s part of a complicated
	Flirtation routine, anyhow, no doubt.  But this talk of
	The garment center?  Surely that’s California sunlight
	Belaboring them and the old crate on which they
	Have draped themselves, fading its Donald Duck insignia
	To the extreme point of legibility.
	Maybe they were lying but more likely their
	Tiny intelligences cannot retain much information.
	Not even one fact, perhaps.  That’s why
	They think they’re in New York.  I like the way
	They look and act and feel.  I wonder
	How they got that way, but am not going to
	Waste any more time thinking about them.
	I have already forgotten them
	Until some day in the not too distant future
	When we meet possibly in the lounge of a modern airport,
	They looking as astonishingly young and fresh as when this picture was made
	But full of contradictory ideas, stupid ones as well as
	Worthwhile ones, but all flooding the surface of our minds
	As we babble about the sky and the weather and the forests of change.

John Ashbery

 

Paradoxes and Oxymorons

This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level.
Look at it talking to you. You look out a window
Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don't have it.
You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other.

The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot.
What's a plain level? It is that and other things,
Bringing a system of them into play. Play?
Well, actually, yes, but l consider play to be

A deeper outside thing, a dreamed role-pattern,
As in the division of grace these long August days
Without proof. Open-ended. And before you know
It gets lost in the steam and chatter of typewriters.

It has been played once more. I think you exist only
To tease me into doing it, on your level, and then you aren't there
Or have adopted a different attitude. And the poem
Has set me softly down beside you. The poem is you.

John Ashbery

John Ashbery (Argyle Socks) by Fairfield Porter/ 

Oil on canvas, 1952 

Wet Casements

When Eduard Raban, coming along the passage, walked into the 
open doorway, he saw that it was raining. It was not raining much. 
KAFKA, Wedding Preparations in the Country 

The concept is interesting: to see, as though reflected 
In streaming windowpanes, the look of others through 
Their own eyes. A digest of their correct impressions of 
Their self-analytical attitudes overlaid by your 
Ghostly transparent face. You in falbalas 
Of some distant but not too distant era, the cosmetics, 
The shoes perfectly pointed, drifting (how long you 
Have been drifting; how long I have too for that matter) 
Like a bottle-imp toward a surface which can never be 
approached, 
Never pierced through into the timeless energy of a present 
Which would have its own opinions on these matters, 
Are an epistemological snapshot of the processes 
That first mentioned your name at some crowded cocktail 
Party long ago, and someone (not the person addressed) 
Overheard it and carried that name around in his wallet 
For years as the wallet crumbled and bills slid in 
And out of it. I want that information very much today, 

Can't have it, and this makes me angry. 
I shall use my anger to build a bridge like that 
Of Avignon, on which people may dance for the feeling 
Of dancing on a bridge. I shall at last see my complete face 
Reflected not in the water but in the worn stone floor of my bridge. 

I shall keep to myself. 

I shall not repeat others' comments about me. 

John Ashbery

 

For John Clare

Kind of empty in the way it sees everything, the earth gets to its feet andsalutes the sky. More of a success at it this time than most others it is. The feeling that the sky might be in the back of someone's mind. Then there is no telling how many there are. They grace everything--bush and tree--to take the roisterer's mind off his caroling--so it's like a smooth switch back. To what was aired in their previous conniption fit. There is so much to be seen everywhere that it's like not getting used to it, only there is so much it never feels new, never any different. You are standing looking at that building and you cannot take it all in, certain details are already hazy and the mind boggles. What will it all be like in five years' time when you try to remember? Will there have been boards in between the grass part and the edge of the street? As long as that couple is stopping to look in that window over there we cannot go. We feel like they have to tell us we can, but they never look our way and they are already gone, gone far into the future--the night of time. If we could look at a photograph of it and say there they are, they never really stopped but there they are. There is so much to be said, and on the surface of it very little gets said.
There ought to be room for more things, for a spreading out, like. Being immersed in the details of rock and field and slope --letting them come to you for once, and then meeting them halfway would be so much easier--if they took an ingenuous pride in being in one's blood. Alas, we perceive them if at all as those things that were meant to be put aside-- costumes of the supporting actors or voice trilling at the end of a narrow enclosed street. You can do nothing with them. Not even offer to pay.
It is possible that finally, like coming to the end of a long, barely perceptible rise, there is mutual cohesion and interaction. The whole scene is fixed in your mind, the music all present, as though you could see each note as well as hear it. I say this because there is an uneasiness in things just now. Waiting for something to be over before you are forced to notice it. The pollarded trees scarcely bucking the wind--and yet it's keen, it makes you fall over. Clabbered sky. Seasons that pass with a rush. After all it's their time too--nothing says they aren't to make something of it. As for Jenny Wren, she cares, hopping about on her little twig like she was tryin' to tell us somethin', but that's just it, she couldn't even if she wanted to--dumb bird. But the others--and they in some way must know too--it would never occur to them to want to, even if they could take the first step of the terrible journey toward feeling somebody should act, that ends in utter confusion and hopelessness, east of the sun and west of the moon. So their comment is: "No comment." Meanwhile the whole history of probabilities is coming to life, starting in the upper left-hand corner, like a sail.