Poems by John Ashbery (b.1927)

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 I 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.

1981

.:::

Everyman´s Library

...the sparrow hath found an house, and the swallow a nest for herself...
-PSALM 84

In the outlying districts where we know something
The sparrows don´t and each house
Is noticeably a little nicer than the rest, the "package"
Is ready to be performed now. It comes

As a sheaf of papyruslike, idle imaginings
And identifyings, and stays put like that.
It´s beginning to get darker. You send someone
Down the flight of stairs to ask after

The true course of events and the answer always
Comes back evasive yet polite: you have only to step down...
Oops, the light went out. That is the paper-thin
But very firm dimension of ordinary education. And when a thief

Is out there, in the dark somewhere, it also applies.
There is no freedom, and no freedom from freedom.
The only possible act is to pick up the book, caress it
And open it in my face. You knew that.

1981

.:::

Faust

If only the phantom would stop reappering!
Business, if you wanted to know, was punk at the opera.
The heroine is no longer appeared in Faust.
The crowds strolled sadly away. The phantom
Watched them from the roof, not guessing the hungers
That must be stirred before disappointment can begin.

One day as morning was about to begin
A man in brown with a white shirt reappearing
At the bottom of his yellow vest, was talking hungers
With the silver-haired director of the opera.
On the green-carpeted floor no phantom
Appeared, except yellow squares of sunlight, like those in Faust.

That night as the musicians for Faust
Were about to go on strike, lest darkness begin
In the corridors, and through then the phantom
Glide unobstructed, the vision reappearing
Of blonde Marguerite practicing a new opera
At her window awoke terrible new hungers

In the already starving tenor. But hungers
Are just another topic, like the new Faust
Drifting through the tunnels of the opera
(In search of lost old age? For they begin
To notice a twinkle in his eye. It is cold daylight reappearing
At the window behind him, itself a phantom

Window, painted by the phantom
Scene painters, sick of not getting paid, of hungers
For a scene below of tiny, reappearing,
Dancers, with a sandbag falling like a note in Faust
Through purple air. And the spectators begin
To understand the bleeding tenor star of the opera.)

That night the opera
Was crowded to the rafters. The phantom
Took twenty-nine courtain calls. "Begin!
Begin!" In the wings the tenor hungers
For the heroine´s convulsive kiss, and Faust
Moves forward, no longer young, reappearing

And reappearing for the last time. The opera
Faust would no longer need its phantom.
On the bare, sunlit stage the hungers could begin.

1962

---
John Ashbery