Free The Double Dream of Spring by John Ashbery

obscurity.
    A firm look of the land, old dismissals
    And the affair was concluded in snow and also in
    The satisfaction of the outline formulated against the sky.
    People were delighted getting up in the morning
    With the density that for once seemed the promise
    Of everything forgotten, and the well-being
    Grew, at the expense of whoever lay dying
    In a small room watched only by the progression
    Of hours in the tight new agreement.
    And they now too seem invaded, though before it was
    The dancers who anticipated making unnecessary
    The curtailment of one to the other. And yet,
    As though this were strict premonition, their chance
    Is cancelled out by earlier claims, a victim perhaps
    Of its earnestness. The dance continues, but darker, and
    As if in a sudden lack of air. And as one figure
    Supplants another, and dies, so the postulate of each
    Tires the shuffling floor with slogans, present
    Complements mindful of our absorbing interest.
    One swallow does not make a summer, but are
    What’s called an opposite: a whole of raveling discontent,
    The sum of all that will ever be deciphered
    On this side of that vast drop of water.
    They let you sleep without pain, having all that
    Not in the lesson, not in the special way of telling
    But back to one side of life, not especially
    Immune to it, in the secret of what goes on:
    The words sung in the next room are unavoidable
    But their passionate intelligence will be studied in you.
    But what could I make of this? Glaze
    Of many identical foreclosures wrested from
    The operative hand, like a judgment but still
    The atmosphere of seeing? That two people could
    Collide in this dusk means that the time of
    Shapelessly foraging had come undone: the space was
    Magnificent and dry. On flat evenings
    In the months ahead, she would remember that that
    Anomaly had spoken to her, words like disjointed beaches
    Brown under the advancing signs of the air.

About the Author
    John Ashbery was born in 1927 in Rochester, New York, and grew up on a farm near Lake Ontario. He studied English at Harvard and at Columbia, and along with his friends Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch, he became a leading voice in what came to be called the New York School of poets. Ashbery’s poetry collection Some Trees was selected by W. H. Auden as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize in 1955—the first of over twenty-five critically admired works Ashbery has published in a career spanning more than six decades. His book Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award, and since then Ashbery has been the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a National Humanities Medal, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and a Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other honors.
    For years, Ashbery taught creative writing at Brooklyn College and Bard College in New York, working with students and codirecting MFA programs while continuing to write and publish award-winning collections of poetry—all marked by his signature philosophical wit, ardent honesty, and polyphonic explorations of modern language. His most recent book of poems is Quick Question , published in 2012. He lives in New York.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
    Copyright © 1997 by John Ashbery
    Cover design by Mimi Bark
    978-1-4804-5918-2
    This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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