Free Your Name Here: Poems by John Ashbery

siblings,
    always anxious to torment, to twist my hair
    into witches’ brooms, with no inherent power?
    Remember they love you like powder
    in the air, and it wouldn’t take them long at all.
    Twenty-five years ago it was different. Please
    be patient. Your term too will arrive.
    See, he’s a very good friend for you, you know that.
    You just don’t want to sit in a pile of ashes all day long,
    licking the milk from your chin. Do you? Then get up
    off your ass, stride into the melting twilight,
    see the sights of the city. More grass
    there than you’d expected, you can bet.
    So I wandered fleecy as a cloud and one day an old shepherd crossed my path, looking very wise with his crook. How much use do you get out of that thing, I asked him. Depends, he replied. Sometimes one of ’em doesn’t go astray for months on end. Other times I’ve got my hands full with them running around in all directions, laughing at me. At me! Well, I never would have taken on this job, this added responsibility, rather, if being thanked was all I’d had on my mind. Yes, I said, but how do you avoid it when someone’s really grateful, and graceful, and you’re fading away like you’re doing now, your rainbow cap a cigar-store Indian’s wooden feather headdress, and all your daughters frantic with glee or misapprehension as you slide by, close to them though they can’t see you? Oh, I’ve learned to cope shall we say, and leave it at that. Yes, I said, by all means, let’s.

NOBODY IS GOING ANYWHERE
    I don’t really understand why you object
    to any of this. Personally I am above suspicion.
    I live in a crawlup where the mice are rotted,
    where midnight tunes absolve the bricklayers
    and the ceiling abounds in God’s sense.
    Something more three-dimensional must be breathed
    into action. But go slow, the falling threads
    speak to life only as through a haze of difficulty.
    The porch is loaded, a question-mark
    swings like an earring at the base of your cheek:
    stubborn, anxious plain. Air and ice,
    those unrelenting fatheads, seem always to be saying,
    “This is where we will be living from now on.”
    In the courtyard a plane tree glistens.
    The ship is already far from here, like a ghost ship.
    The core of the sermon is always distance, landscape
    waiting to be considered, maybe loved a little
    eventually. And I do, I do.

POEM ON SEVERAL OCCASIONS
    In truth there is room for disquiet
    in the wake of the admonitory hiss that accompanies
    me wherever I go, to the dentist and back
    or sometimes a squeak of approval
    will eavesdrop on what I just said,
    or even a tiny quiver of applause
    will blur in the middle distance, causing
    even more distant dogs to bark.
    I like to watch the stars giggle and nibble
    my hand as I hold it out in a trusting gesture,
    like Goethe indicating some Italian hills his companions
    might otherwise have overlooked. “I tell you,
    it’s all in the seasons, or the seasoning, Wolfgang—
    otherwise all your inventions might as well have
    washed up on a distant strand.” That’s right,
    blame me for the ethics issue. Meanwhile can’t you
    see that children, young adolescents really, are waking
    under apple trees, picking up their bookbags listlessly
    and traipsing down the road that presumably leads to school?
    There they’ll read about what we—you and I—have
    said to each other on important occasions.
    No one will be any wiser. Twenty scarlet nuns
    came in and led them off in the direction
    of the forest, whence issues a medley of big-band
    tunes by forgotten composers from the turn of the century.
    Now another century is turning. Will it be pretty or depressed?
    What have you to say for that jacket you’re wearing, those baggy
    pants the color of scarlet elm-leaves?
    It will turn out to be a popular color in the new century.
    They will call it “white.”

SLUMBERER
    Bug-eyed at the possibilities
    she slumbers.
    I mean there were more of us on anthrax
    than not.
    Out of the coal