Free A Wave by John Ashbery

things.
    Once, someone—my father—came to me and spoke
    Extreme words amid the caution of the time.
    I was too drunk, too scared to know what was being said
    Around us then, only that it was a final
    Shelving off, that it was now and 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?

A Wave
    To pass through pain and not know it,
    A car door slamming in the night.
    To emerge on an invisible terrain.
    So the luck of speaking out
    A little too late came to be worshipped in various guises:
    A mute actor, a future saint intoxicated with the idea of martyrdom;
    And our landscape came to be as it is today:
    Partially out of focus, some of it too near, the middle distance
    A haven of serenity and unreachable, with all kinds of nice
    People and plants waking and stretching, calling
    Attention to themselves with every artifice of which the human
    Genre is capable. And they called it our home.
    No one came to take advantage of these early
    Reverses, no doorbell rang;
    Yet each day of the week, once it had arrived, seemed the threshold
    Of love and desperation again. At night it sang
    In the black trees: My mindless, oh my mindless, oh.
    And it could be that it was Tuesday, with dark, restless clouds
    And puffs of white smoke against them, and below, the wet streets
    That seem so permanent, and all of a sudden the scene changes:
    It’s another idea, a new conception, something submitted
    A long time ago, that only now seems about to work
    To destroy at last the ancient network
    Of letters, diaries, ads for civilization.
    It passes through you, emerges on the other side
    And is now a distant city, with all
    The possibilities shrouded in a narrative moratorium.
    The chroniqueurs who bad-mouthed it, the honest
    Citizens whose going down into the day it was,
    Are part of it, though none
    Stand with you as you mope and thrash your way through time,
    Imagining it as it is, a kind of tragic euphoria
    In which your spirit sprouted. And which is justified in you.
    In the haunted house no quarter is given: in that respect
    It’s very much business as usual. The reductive principle
    Is no longer there, or isn’t enforced as much as before.
    There will be no getting away from the prospector’s
    Hunch; past experience matters again; the tale will stretch on
    For miles before it is done. There would be more concerts
    From now on, and the ground on which a man and his wife could
    Look at each other and laugh, remembering how love is to them,
    Shrank and promoted a surreal intimacy, like jazz music
    Moving over furniture, to say how pleased it was
    Or something. In the end only a handshake
    Remains, something like a kiss, but fainter. Were we
    Making sense? Well, that thirst will account for some
    But not all of the marvelous graffiti; meanwhile
    The oxygen of the days sketches the rest,
    The balance. Our story is no longer alone.
    There is a rumbling there
    And now it ends, and in a luxurious hermitage
    The straws of self-defeat are drawn. The short one wins.
    One idea is enough to organize a life and project it
    Into unusual but viable forms, but many ideas merely
    Lead one thither into a morass of their own good intentions.
    Think how many the average person has during the course of a day, or night,
    So that they become a luminous backdrop to ever-repeated
    Gestures, having no life of their own, but only echoing
    The suspicions of their possessor. It’s fun to scratch around
    And maybe come up with something. But for the tender blur
    Of the setting to mean something, words must be ejected bodily,
    A certain crispness be avoided in favor of a density
    Of strutted opinion doomed to wilt in oblivion: not too linear
    Nor yet too puffed and remote. Then the advantage