John Ashbery: Fifteen poems

OPERATORS ARE STANDING BY

In some of the stores they sell a cheese rinse

for disturbed or depressed hair. You add whiskey

to it at the last moment. Now that

it's nearly Christmas, we could buy

such things, you and I, and take them with us,

though it seems like

only yesterday I hit that halloween homerun.

It backed up and kind of flowed back

into my side I think, creating a "strawberry

jar" effect, There was nothing Olin

or I could do about it.

Determining everyone is a bigshot

is sometimes all he cares about.

I've slept on the ground with him,

and deep in a birchbark canoe.

Once there was two of him.

At school no one could tell us apart

until we smiled, or his big laugh came unbuttoned.

Fatally, venery has taken its toll

of him these last years. I can't

get near him without being reminded of Venus,

or the hunt. I come in six different packages,

from the "jewel case" to Wrigley's spearmint.

In the time of friendly moose

droppings I followed them to the Shedd Aquarium.

No one was selling tickets that day.

I wandered in and out of the fish tanks,

stopping occasionally to leave a hand print

on the plate glass for the benefit of some fish or other.

THE WAITING CEREMONY

The binding clause-

it concerns us,

behooves us to behoove it.

Yet I'm so far away

(I'm not far away)...

Eighty-eight keys on a piano-

how do they know that?

I mean, know that? Oh, sure,

I know how they know it.

Excuse me for living.

Once in a while

the fun gets taken out

of what wasn't supposed to be fun.

That's the boiling point, what

they mean by one.

I get a stiff neck watching.

But then it seems old cereals (or serials)

are the part-time joke--like this rubber of bridge,

with all the bridges receding into the distance, brought

to their time of rightness. I would stress

the very white side of a house. Go on,

give it away, give it to a child

or some tax-free person.

(Nothing bumptious about that.)

We hold all the ends

of the story, like the four corners of a sheet,

resuming and resuming. We are the thick.

And the thin.

YOU WOULD HAVE THOUGHT

Meanwhile, back in

soulless America, people are having fun

as usual.

A bird visits a birdbath.

A young girl takes a refresher course

in polyhistory. My mega-units are straining

at the leash of spring.

The annual race is on-

white flowers in someone's hair.

He comes in waltzing on empty airs,

mulling the blues notes of your case.

The leash is elastic and receptive

but I fear I am too wrapped up in cloudlets

of my own making this time.

In the other time it was rain dripping

from a tree to a house to the ground-

each thing helping itself and another thing

along a little. That would be inconceivable

these days of receptive answers and aggressive querying.

The routine is all too familiar,

the stone path wearying.

THE GREEN MUMMIES

Avuncular and teeming, the kind luggage

hosed down the original site. Who is ready

last, but I kind of get a kick

out of what-the-heck's surface optimism.

He doesn't believe in sex--that's one point

in his favor--but knows all the standard

Antonio stories and has told them to the Ladies'

Auxiliary in Loophole. You see, all his life

he wanted to be a trainer, or something, maggots

even. But fate's crow-like wing

had other plans for him. We were meant o have slept

during the time we were awake and learning; conversely,

as air-raid wardens we made good Michelin men--the tummy

always in repose, the chin barely protected by a ruff

of sneering blight. But it's time

you took that old comforter off. Adam and Eve

on a raft could say good day here, laughter in the

loved opus sounding. Yet wan derision only

watches, won't come forward. Next year is electric;

This one only divides and serves us, bathes us,

as we know how. Better pickled moray eel

than a jungle diorama, full of who knows what quirks

and surfaces. Yet I like him; his white hat

fell off and landed in the sound. Mortified,

he herded us into the vestibule; we had brought

the wrong kind of medlars.

OBEDIENCE SCHOOL

Let us leave the obedience school.

The door is open. Outside the sun is shining.

Why do you hesitate? Why do you hold back?

If there were some warts on the obedience school

we should have known about it before this.

You don't learn the cancan at obedience school.

Yup. But the parkway night is festering.

Besides, there are so many trained-dog acts now

nobody wants any competition.

That's why I bought Flossie the ticket

back to Puyallup. Her ladies-in-waiting

were flouting the scent of incense smouldering;

her high heels provoked "zounds!" of acclaim

from the wrong kind of gent-customer

we want no truck with.

And when the old school shudders

in a sudden ray of March sun,

accusers and behoovers alike will be believed;

behemoths and mammoths struggle and give up

in the aquarium dawn. Then a run on the feed stores

ensues. Causes are given up for lost. The queen's pony

capers on its hind legs, quite as if narcissism

were going out of style. Poor children! Why, it broke their heart,

but Dad's with them now. Dad can conquer this thing.

CHAPTER II, BOOK 35

He was a soldier or a Shaker. At least he was doing something,

going somewhere. Often, in the evenings, he'd rant about Mark Twain,