Reports of looting and insane buggery behind altars: John Ashbery's queer politics - gay poet

Ashbery hopes to provide some alternatives to this result, thus the paratactically generous "there are. . . there are . . . there are" structure of the middle stanzas of the poem. It is not that "we" can prevent "our" numbers from ending up in the trash, but rather that "we" can forge responses different from "screaming like a gull at vacuity, / Hating it for being what it is." The "there are"'s catalogue sites of waste. Pastoral "Manure piles under the slop and surge of a March sun," "pale plumes of dullness," and "insipid flowering meads" begin to bend toward more abstract and less pastoral wastes: "Wastes of acting out daytime courtesies at night, // Deadfalls of resolution, arks of self-preservation / Arenas of unused indulgence" (9395). In the midst of this list comes a stanza describing a moment of subdued but expressed desire:

Thunderheads of after-dinner cigar smoke in some varnished salon Offer ample cover for braiding two coat-tails together Around the clumsy arm of an s-shaped settee. In a screech the occasion has disappeared, the clamor resumed like a climate.

The "braiding" of coat-tails can only occur under a smelly, dark cloud, around the "clumsy" arm of an awkward piece of furniture. This moment of expression occurs in silence and evaporates in a queeny "screech" and "clamor." The list of images, pastoral and abstract, insists on the presence of waste and discomfort in any momentary beauty or landscape the fairies can achieve. At the close of the list, Ashbery asks when this wild ride of waste and exaltation stops: "Where do we get off / The careening spear of rye?"(95). His answer to this question is the proposition that "we" don't, but that "we" need to theorize the mixture of good and bad from the position of someone who has to drink sour milk telling himself: "But it all gets mixed up in your stomach anyway" (95). Ashbery suggests a change of point of view, or what I have been suggesting is a declared theoretical standpoint: it's not how the milk tastes, it's that it fulfills a nutritional need. Thus, experiences might never be unmitigatedly good for fairies, but it is possible to rethink the mixture of good with bad not as good or even satisfactory but as at least livable and postulate livability as the possibility for exaltation.

The final image of the poem is one of unrestrained limpidity, where after declaring that "we," fairies, "dance on hills above the wind / and leave our footsteps behind. / We raise their tomatoes. / The clear water in the chipped basin reflects it all: / A spoiled life, alive, and streaming with light" (95). The final lyric movement suggests that what is called the "spoiled" or even "furtive" is "alive, and streaming with light" when seen from the fairy's-eye view above the crisp image of a sink. A lyric moment, gazing at oneself reflected in clear water, jumps into lucidity, producing a self-preserving comment: while seemingly hidden and wrecked, homosexual identities are on the contrary filled with lyricism and light partly because of their banished condition from other forms of visibility and order. Ashbery's poem offers testimony that fairies' lives are lived and sung.