Free Your Name Here: Poems by John Ashbery Page B

Rye is my all-time favorite book.
    And how about you? Do you, too, come out here
    with your family on Saturday afternoons, hoping
    for a little rest and relaxation, far
    from the city and its desks? Here they have daffodils.
    Look, there is one over there by the city.
    They have a name for it. “Detroit.”
    And all the time I thought I was being a pest
    someone was desperately in love with me.
    The person sickened and apparently died
    in a hospital far away. Now I have no one,
    no friends to gripe with or call coaxing names to.
    I was definitely born at the wrong time
    or in the wrong city. Pot-luck dinners were shared.
    I thought I had gone to hell. Too bad I woke up in time.

SHORT-TERM MEMORY
    A few things came to observe me:
    a terrible explosion,
    flowers, dustiness in the boroughs,
    planners plagued by increasingly goofy proposals.
    I could have pretended not to be in.
    Instead I came to the door in shirtsleeves,
    extending a hand to the vexed guests. “What about those Orioles,
    this terribly warm weather we’ve been having?” Truthfully,
    I was suffering from the heat and didn’t know it.
    It was enough just then to perceive life as a sandbar,
    or a mirage of one, that the tide is frantically
    trying to erase so as to cover its tracks.
    Broken discoveries invaded my short-term memory,
    but not so you’d notice. Continuing the polite
    palaver I asked after the health of this one and that one,
    how little Lois was doing in school, what Howie was up to
    in his treehouse. It was as though no one cared.
    Or had seen me. They shuffled aimlessly away
    to come alive later no doubt in some sex sequence,
    while here leaves are browning before the end of summer
    and the groundskeeper waits.
    What about your immortal soul?
    I may have lost it, just this once, but other chapters
    will arrive, bright as a child’s watercolor,
    and you’d want to be around me.

VENDANGES
    A tall building in the fifteenth arrondissement faded away slowly and then completely vanished. Toward November the weather grew very bitter. No one knew why or even noticed. I forgot to tell you your hat looked perky.
    A new way of falling asleep has been discovered. Senior citizens snoop around to impose that sleep. You awake feeling refreshed but something has changed. Perhaps it’s the children singing too much. Sophie shouldn’t have taken them to the concert. I pleaded with her at the time, to no avail. Also, they have the run of the yard. Someone else might want to use it, or have it be empty. All the chairs were sat on in one night.
    And I was pale and restless. The actors walked with the to the cabins. I knew that someone was about to lose or destroy my life’s work, or invention. Yet something urged calm on me.
    There is an occasional friend left, yes. Married men, hand to mouth. I went down to the exhibition. We came back and listened to some records. Strange, I hadn’t noticed the lava pouring. But it’s there, she said, every night of the year, like a river. I guess I notice things less now than I used to,
    when I was young.
    And the arbitrariness of so much of it, like sheep’s wool from a carding comb. You can’t afford to be vigilant, she said. You must stay this way, always, open and vulnerable. Like a body cavity. Then if you are noticed it will be too late to file the architectural pants. We must, as you say, keep in touch. Not to be noticed. If it was for this I was born, I murmured under my breath. What have I been doing around here, all this month? Waiting for the repairman, I suppose.
    Where were you when the last droplets dribbled? Fastening my garter belt to my panty hose. The whole thing was over in less time than you could say Jack Robinson and we were back at base camp, one little thing after another gone wrong, yet on the whole life is spiritual. Still, it is time to pull up stakes. Probably we’ll meet a hooded stranger on the path who will point out a direction for us to take, and that will be okay too, interesting