John Ashbery

“What name do I have for you?Certainly there is no name for youIn the sense that the stars have namesThat somehow fit them. Just walking around,An object of curiosity to some,But you are too preoccupiedBy the secret smudge in the back of your soulTo say much and wander around,Smiling to yourself and others.It gets to be kind of lonelyBut at the same time off-putting.Counterproductive, as you realize once againThat the longest way is the most efficient way,The one that looped among islands, andYou always seemed to be traveling in a circle.And now that the end is nearThe segments of the trip swing open like an orange.There is light in there and mystery and food.Come see it.Come not for me but it.But if I am still there, grant that we may see each other.”

“How many people came and stayed a certain time,Uttered light or dark speech that became part of youLike light behind windblown fog and sandFiltered and influenced by it, until no partRemains that is surely you.”

“It was always November there.”

“Leaves around the door are penciled losses.”

“We live our lives, made up of a great quantity of / isolated instants / So as to be lost at the heart of a multitude of things.”

“Some departure from the normWill occur as time grows more open about it.The consensus gradually changed; nobodyLies about it any more. Rust dark pouringOver the body, changing it without decay—People with too many things on their minds, but we liveIn the interstices, between a vacant stare and the ceiling,Our lives remind us. Finally this is consciousnessAnd the other livers of it get off at the same stop.How careless. Yet in the end each of usIs seen to have traveled the same distance—it’s timeThat counts, and how deeply you have invested in it,Crossing the street of an event, as though coming out of it wereThe same as making it happen. You’re not sorry,Of course, especially if this was the way it had to happen,Yet would like an exacter share, something about timeThat only a clock can tell you: how it feels, not what it means.It is a long field, and we know only the far end of it,Not the part we presumably had to go through to get there.If it isn’t enough, take the ideaInherent in the day, armloads of wheat and flowersLying around flat on handtrucks, if maybe it means moreIn pertaining to you, yet what is is what happens in the endAs though you cared. The event combined withBeams leading up to it for the look of force adapted to the wiserUsages of age, but it’s both thereAnd not there, like washing or sawdust in the sunlight,At the back of the mind, where we live now.”

“The genius of Cornell is that he sees and enables us to see with the eyes of childhood, before our vision got clouded by experience, when objects like a rubber ball or a pocket mirror seemed charged with meaning, and a marble rolling across a wooden floor could be as portentous as a passing comet.”

“A little bunny or some kind of ferret was probablythere too, and bore witness as only rodents can.”

“Just when I thought there wasn't room enough for another thought in my head, I had this great idea—”

“The first year was like icing. Then the cake started to show through …”

“Things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision”

“Its a bit mad. Too bad, I mean, that getting to know each just for a fleeting second Must be replaced by unperfect knowledge of the featureless wholeLike some pocket history of the world, so generalAs to constitute a sob or wail”

“I'm heading for a clean-named placelike Wisconsin, and mad as a jack-o'-lantern, will get therewithout help and nosy proclivities.”

“The summer demands and takes away too much. /But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes”

“I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free.”

“until only infinity remained of beauty”

“The music brought us what it seemed / We had long desired, but in a form / so rarefied there was no emptiness of sensation”

“Oh there once was a womanand she kept a shopselling trinkets to touristsnot far from a dockwho came to see what life could befar back on the island.And it was always a party therealways different but very niceNew friends to give you adviceor fall in love with you which is niceand each grew so perfectly from the otherit was a marvel of poetryand irony”

“The evening light was like honey in the treesWhen you left me and walked to the end of the streetWhere the sunset abruptly ended.The wedding-cake drawbridge lowered itselfTo the fragile forget-me-not flower.You climbed aboard.Burnt horizons suddenly paved with golden stones,Dreams I had, including suicide,Puff out the hot-air balloon now.It is bursting, it is about to burst”

“Tomorrow would alter the sense of what had already been learned, That the learning process is extended in this way, so that from this standpoint None of us ever graduates from college, For time is an emulsion, and probably thinking not to grow up Is the brightest kind of maturity for us, right now at any rate.”

“This was our ambition: to be small and clear and free. Alas, the summer’s energy wanes quickly, A moment and it is gone. And no longer May we make the necessary arrangements, simple as they are. Our star was brighter perhaps when it had water in it.”

“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?”

“Once you've lived in France, you don't want to live anywhere else, including France.”

“Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the strong possibilities that they are founded on nothing.”

“So one can lose a good ideaby not writing it down, yet by losing it one can have it: it nourishes other asidesit knows nothing of, would not recognize itself in, yet when the negotiationsare terminated, speaks in the acts of that progenitor, and doesrecognize itself, is grateful for not having done so earlier.”

“...as if I were only a flower after all and not the map of the country in which it grows.”

“In the increasingly convincing darknessThe words become palpable, like a fruitThat is too beautiful to eat. ”

“The term ignorant is indeed perhaps an overstatement, implying as it does that something is known somewhere, whereas in reality we are not even sure of this: we in fact cannot aver with any degree of certainty that we are ignorant. Yet this is not so bad; we have at any rate kept our open-mindedness -- that, at least, we may be sure that we have -- and are not in any danger, or so it seems, of freezing into the pious attitudes of those true spiritual bigots whose faces are turned toward eternity and who therefore can see nothing.”

“The facts of history have been too well rehearsed (I'm speaking needless to say not of written history but the oral kind that goes on in you without your having to do anything about it). . .”

“But it is the same thing we are all seeing,Our world. Go after it,Go get it boy, says the man holding the stick.Eat, says the hunger, and we plunge blindly in again,Into the chamber behind the thought”