Which Only Quiet Walking Ever Instructs

Six-miler around Catoctin yesterday with Earthgirl. From Chimney Rocks, the rock outcrop and view about two-thirds through, you can see Sugarloaf twenty-five miles to the southeast. Today is Corbin Cabin in Shenandoah with Planet and Air too. Also, Happy Birthday to my father (who reads this blog daily to monitor news of his grand-daughter and daughter-in-law) who got us the hell out of Ghost Town, Pennsylvania in 1964 for which I don't thank him enough. He's BBQing salmon tonight for us.

Saturday intermittent tradition is to post songs heard on Bryce's Friday show. Bryce was off today, fill-in host was Ira the K. Below the poem is Ira the K's band's latest single, first, the Morton Feldman piece Ira the K played yesterday:








RIVERS AND MOUNTAINS

John Ashbery

On the secret map the assassins   

Cloistered, the Moon River was marked   

Near the eighteen peaks and the city

Of humiliation and defeat—wan ending   

Of the trail among dry, papery leaves   

Gray-brown quills like thoughts

In the melodious but vast mass of today’s   

Writing through fields and swamps

Marked, on the map, with little bunches of weeds.   

Certainly squirrels lived in the woods   

But devastation and dull sleep still   

Hung over the land, quelled

The rioters turned out of sleep in the peace of prisons   

Singing on marble factory walls   

Deaf consolation of minor tunes that pack   

The air with heavy invisible rods   

Pent in some sand valley from

Which only quiet walking ever instructs.   

The bird flew over and

Sat—there was nothing else to do.

Do not mistake its silence for pride or strength

Or the waterfall for a harbor

Full of light boats that is there

Performing for thousands of people   

In clothes some with places to go   

Or games. Sometimes over the pillar   

Of square stones its impact

Makes a light print.

So going around cities

To get to other places you found   

It all on paper but the land

Was made of paper processed   

To look like ferns, mud or other   

Whose sea unrolled its magic   

Distances and then rolled them up   

Its secret was only a pocket

After all but some corners are darker

Than these moonless nights spent as on a raft

In the seclusion of a melody heard   

As though through trees

And you can never ignite their touch   

Long but there were homes

Flung far out near the asperities   

Of a sharp, rocky pinnacle

And other collective places

Shadows of vineyards whose wine   

Tasted of the forest floor

Fisheries and oyster beds

Tides under the pole

Seminaries of instruction, public   

Places for electric light

And the major tax assessment area   

Wrinkled on the plan

Of election to public office

Sixty-two years old bath and breakfast   

The formal traffic, shadows

To make it not worth joining

After the ox had pulled away the cart.

Your plan was to separate the enemy into two groups   

With the razor-edged mountains between.

It worked well on paper

But their camp had grown

To be the mountains and the map   

Carefully peeled away and not torn   

Was the light, a tender but tough bark

On everything. Fortunately the war was solved   

In another way by isolating the two sections   

Of the enemy’s navy so that the mainland   

Warded away the big floating ships.   

Light bounced off the ends   

Of the small gray waves to tell   

Them in the observatory   

About the great drama that was being won

To turn off the machinery

And quietly move among the rustic landscape   

Scooping snow off the mountains rinsing

The coarser ones that love had   

Slowly risen in the night to overflow   

Wetting pillow and petal   

Determined to place the letter

On the unassassinated president’s desk

So that a stamp could reproduce all this

In detail, down to the last autumn leaf

And the affliction of June ride

Slowly out into the sun-blackened landscape.