Free A Wave by John Ashbery Page A

of
    Sinking in oneself, crashing through the skylight of one’s own
    Received opinions redirects the maze, setting up significant
    Erections of its own at chosen corners, like gibbets,
    And through this the mesmerizing plan of the landscape becomes,
    At last, apparent. It is no more a landscape than a golf course is,
    Though sensibly a few natural bonuses have been left in. And as it
    Focuses itself, it is the backward part of a life that is
    Partially coming into view. It’s there, like a limb. And the issue
    Of making sense becomes such a far-off one. Isn’t this “sense”—
    This little of my life that I can see—that answers me
    Like a dog, and wags its tail, though excitement and fidelity are
    About all that ever gets expressed? What did I ever do
    To want to wander over into something else, an explanation
    Of how I behaved, for instance, when knowing can have this
    Sublime rind of excitement, like the shore of a lake in the desert
    Blazing with the sunset? So that if it pleases all my constructions
    To collapse, I shall at least have had that satisfaction, and known
    That it need not be permanent in order to stay alive,
    Beaming, confounding with the spell of its good manners.
    As with rocks at low tide, a mixed surface is revealed,
    More detritus. Still, it is better this way
    Than to have to live through a sequence of events acknowledged
    In advance in order to get to a primitive statement. And the mind
    Is the beach on which the rocks pop up, just a neutral
    Support for them in their indignity. They explain
    The trials of our age, cleansing it of toxic
    Side-effects as it passes through their system.
    Reality. Explained. And for seconds
    We live in the same body, are a sibling again.
    I think all games and disciplines are contained here,
    Painting, as they go, dots and asterisks that
    We force into meanings that don’t concern us
    And so leave us behind. But there are no fractions, the world is an integer
    Like us, and like us it can neither stand wholly apart nor disappear.
    When one is young it seems like a very strange and safe place,
    But now that I have changed it feels merely odd, cold
    And full of interest. The sofa that was once a seat
    Puzzles no longer, while the sweet conversation that occurs
    At regular intervals throughout the years is like a collie
    One never outgrows. And it happens to you
    In this room, it is here, and we can never
    Eat of the experience. It drags us down. Much later on
    You thought you perceived a purpose in the game at the moment
    Another player broke one of the rules; it seemed
    A module for the wind, something in which you lose yourself
    And are not lost, and then it pleases you to play another day
    When outside conditions have changed and only the game
    Is fast, perplexed and true, as it comes to have seemed.
    Yet one does know why. The covenant we entered
    Bears down on us, some are ensnared, and the right way,
    It turns out, is the one that goes straight through the house
    And out the back. By so many systems
    As we are involved in, by just so many
    Are we set free on an ocean of language that comes to be
    Part of us, as though we would ever get away.
    The sky is bright and very wide, and the waves talk to us,
    Preparing dreams we’ll have to live with and use. The day will come
    When we’ll have to. But for now
    They’re useless, more trees in a landscape of trees.
    I hadn’t expected a glance to be that direct, coming from a sculpture
    Of moments, thoughts added on. And I had kept it
    Only as a reminder, not out of love. In time I moved on
    To become its other side, and then, gentle, anxious, I became as a parent
    To those scenes lifted from “real life.” There was the quiet time
    In the supermarket, and the pieces
    Of other people’s lives as they sashayed or tramped past
    My own section of a corridor, not pausing
    In many cases to wonder where they were—maybe they even knew.
    True, those things or moments of which one
    Finds oneself an enthusiast, a