Free Your Name Here: Poems by John Ashbery Page A

bin
    lumbers
    our governor. He hasn’t been getting too much sleep of late.
    Something puzzles him. I know—it’s the seepage
    of ink in the dairy trough. It bothers him, I now know.
    Our way,
    that way and in.
    Besides, it’s elsewhere.
    Adventurous.
    Wind your way to
    the floor.
    Noggins were getting a workout,
    and all we wanted was the way to the zoo.
    We wanted to free the flamingos
    but they took off and flew right over our heads,
    almost grazing them.
    I thought I was going to get knocked down.
    Then a kind zoo attendant came over. “It’s natural,”
    he explained, “at your age (cough, cough), to want to do something
    for these pests, or pets, but it’s really better to do nothing
    for them or anybody. See, they’re used to a certain profundity
    and get all riled when it’s disturbed
    even by a well-intentioned impulse such as yours, especially
    if it’s well intentioned. Such, I fear,
    is the essence of the tragi-comic. But who could live without it?”
    You may well ask, you
    who have never done a lick of work save clang metal gates in people’s pusses.
    Point taken, though. We live in an old soup of the tragi-comic.
    Werewolves circle us, wishing they were us.
    We, on the other hand, wish only that we were somewhere else.
    Now are you going to let us into the cage, or what?
    Swiftly it was done. A swarm of passenger pigeons whooshed past,
    some of them dropping like mayflies, for they were after all extinct,
    only some of them hadn’t heard about it yet. Other rarae aves
    were nowhere to be seen, though the label on the cage
    indicated otherwise. But it was old and rusted,
    like the cage itself. Hey, does anybody take care of this place?
    It’s like a ghost-zoo.
    Aye, and so it is, my son.
    You’ve only just noticed? Well, we come up with some pretty
    extraordinary things down this way—smouldering peat-bog golf courses
    with skeleton golfers, hoping for that hole in one
    that comes all too regularly.
    We have academies for the undistinguished
    with long waiting lists, and subscriptions to the opera,
    only you wouldn’t want to hear any of ’em, not if I was you.
    Our pre-schoolers are famished, and the grade school is full of microbes.
    I could carry you on my back,
    I suppose, across the smouldering turf to the nineteenth hole
    where we could wet whistles with some sake and dim sum,
    only I wouldn’t advise you to stay around much after sunset.
    Oh, not that anything funny goes on. Nothing ever does,
    in fact. It’s just a wide, loose kind of feeling
    that refocuses you on yourself like a truant lens
    in some aged Kodak, and you see all you can or ever wanted to be,
    laid out on the gravel littoral, drying in the sun,
    as if there wasn’t enough to stink up the place as it is.
    Well, I’ll be paying my respects to your missus,
    who, no offense, knows me better than she may have let on.
    But who cares? Life is a carnival,
    I think. Besides, it’s elsewhere.
    Night started to shrivel as he departed.
    We were wondering what on earth we were doing here, and how
    to extricate ourselves, should we ever really want to.

POT LUCK
    You always leave me where we left off.
    You bring me every little thing,
    which is probably a mistake.
    You shaved my canary once.
    I am anxious to be out by the speedway.
    At least, almost nothing happens there.
    I was drugged by a cat once
    on the edge of Lake Lucerne. Woke
    feeling like a businessman without portfolio.
    Wait, here goes a new one. He’ll examine the fork
    to see if it’s rooted. Well, it is. In danger.
    In the past, which is much the same thing.
    So we dance the bolero in times like these.
    I believe I am slimmer than my last bathing suit.
    Tommy sat on the step, looking so cute. It was
    run for your lives, now or never. Now
    I don’t feel so much better. I had dropped off the letter
    at the office, thinking it would be quicker.
    Perhaps the editor never got it. I enjoy playing
    the glass harmonica, am slender and look half my age.
    Catcher in the