Two Poems by John Ashbery (1927-2017)

 

At North Farm

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,
Give you the thing he has for you?

Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him sometimes,
Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?

.::

Problems

Rough stare, sometimes a hello,
A something to carry. Yes and over it
The feeeling of one to one like leaves blowing
Between this imaginary, real world and the sky
Which is sometimes a terrible color
But is surely always and only as we imagine it?
I forgot ro say there are extra things.
Once, someone -my father- came to me and spoke
Extre words amid the caution of time.
I was too drunk, too scared to know what was being said
Around us then, only that it was final
Shelving off, that it was now or never,
The way things would come to pass.
You can subscribe to this.
It always lets you know how well 
You´re doing, how well along the thing is with its growing.
Was it a pattern of wheat
On the spotted walls you wanted to show me
Or are these the things always coming,
The churning, moving support that lets us rock still?

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From A wave,John Ashbery  2003, Penguin Random House