It Remains for Us to Come to Terms With Our Commonality and In So Doing Deprive Time of Further Hostages

HOTEL LAUTREAMONT

John Ashbery

  1.

Research has shown that ballads were produced by all of society

working as a team. They didn’t just happen. There was no guesswork.

The people, then, knew what they wanted and how to get it.

We see the results in works as diverse as “Windsor Forest” and “The Wife of Usher’s Well.”   

Working as a team, they didn’t just happen. There was no guesswork.

The horns of elfland swing past, and in a few seconds

we see the results in works as diverse as “Windsor Forest” and “The Wife of Usher’s Well,”

or, on a more modern note, in the finale of the Sibelius violin concerto.

The horns of elfland swing past, and in a few seconds

the world, as we know it, sinks into dementia, proving narrative passé,

or in the finale of the Sibelius violin concerto.

Not to worry, many hands are making work light again.

The world, as we know it, sinks into dementia, proving narrative passé.

In any case the ruling was long overdue.

Not to worry, many hands are making work light again,

so we stay indoors. The quest was only another adventure.

   2.

In any case, the ruling was long overdue.

The people are beside themselves with rapture

so we stay indoors. The quest was only another adventure

and the solution problematic, at any rate far off in the future.

The people are beside themselves with rapture

yet no one thinks to question the source of so much collective euphoria,

and the solution: problematic, at any rate far off in the future.

The saxophone wails, the martini glass is drained.

Yet no one thinks to question the source of so much collective euphoria.

In troubled times one looked to the shaman or priest for comfort and counsel.

The saxophone wails, the martini glass is drained,

and night like black swansdown settles on the city.

In troubled times one looked to the shaman or priest for comfort and counsel.

Now, only the willing are fated to receive death as a reward,

and night like black swansdown settles on the city.

If we tried to leave, would being naked help us?

   3.

Now, only the willing are fated to receive death as a reward.

Children twist hula-hoops, imagining a door to the outside.

If we tried to leave, would being naked help us?

And what of older, lighter concerns? What of the river?

Children twist hula-hoops, imagining a door to the outside,

when all we think of is how much we can carry with us.

And what of older, lighter concerns? What of the river?

All the behemoths have filed through the maze of time.

When all we think of is how much we can carry with us

small wonder that those at home sit, nervous, by the unlit grate.

All the behemoths have filed through the maze of time.

It remains for us to come to terms with our commonality.

Small wonder that those at home sit nervous by the unlit grate.

It was their choice, after all, that spurred us to feats of the imagination.

It remains for us to come to terms with our commonality

and in so doing deprive time of further hostages.

   4.

It was their choice, after all, that spurred us to feats of the imagination.

Now, silently as one mounts a stair we emerge into the open

and in so doing deprive time of further hostages,

to end the standoff that history long ago began.

Now, silently as one mounts a stair we emerge into the open

but it is shrouded, veiled: We must have made some ghastly error.

To end the standoff that history long ago began

must we thrust ever onward, into perversity?

But it is shrouded, veiled: We must have made some ghastly error.

You mop your forehead with a rose, recommending its thorns.

Must we thrust ever onward, into perversity?

Only night knows for sure; the secret is safe with her.

You mop your forehead with a rose, recommending its thorns.

Research has shown that ballads were produced by all of society;

only night knows for sure. The secret is safe with her:

The people, then, knew what they wanted and how to get it.

The traditional BLCKDGRD Holy Day post

Ashbery born 99 years ago today, I have read - and posted - Vaucanson (down below) more than any other poem by anybody ever. The first sentence in the fourth stanza? Exactly.

I say this every year: fifty years ago someone gave me a copy of Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror and changed my life. 

Much much more below the fold 

2019:  My next tattoo, again cobalt blue, that first sentence fourth stanza, facing me from inner right wrist to inner right elbow, I H T W T G A D T L W L I P T D 

2020: No tattoo yet, negotiations with Earthgirl, who said I could get another tattoo anywhere on my body normally covered by clothes but please not another on my forearm and please not on my calves, had stalled when plague hit 

2020: I can tell by how I'm writing here and in and on tablets I've been reading Ashbery, a poem a day, working my way through Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems, more than one a day in Maine, reading the ones that talk to me, not worrying the few that don't, that is all that's to it

2020: Ashbery's birthday post never a second thought but the remainder of the run of Holy Days I had a second thought for all but Gass who I've never, this recent bloom of sudden done rampant, I can hear it and read it in my head, I don't want to hear it or read it with my ears and eyes, I started the rereading of *Notes from the Air* just to see if Ashbery too, and no 

2020: All that got a second thought (and Gass, who never) will be birthdayed with all proper copy/pasting (if not (as m)any new 2020: bullets)

2021: Read *Flow Chart* for a second time past February, I admit I started it out of duty (I'd reread everything else at least twice and in most cases more and in some cases *lots* more, and enjoyed it more than I remember the liking the first time

2021: Still no tattoo, I could blame the plague but it's me, I still love the poem, don't need the tattoo

2021: View from the deck of the house in Seal Cove Maine where I'm typing this sentence at six in the morning

2022: Still no tattoo but there are plans for a new tattoo soon, not I H T W T G A D T L W L I P T D (which still may happen) but matching tattoos w C of C's Napoleon

Also too, the plan is to be here for Ashbery's birthday for years 

(2023: though yesterday the owners told us we should rent the two weeks the first week of October *next* year and maybe, just maybe)

 

2024: We cancelled our Maine trip, needed stay in town, o well. Still no new tattoo, the sixteen letters or Napoleon. Ashbery's *Late Collected Poems,* the paperback not the hardback first edition, in backpack the past three months, one poem a day, yesterday's added at the bottom of post. 

The late July birthday bounty upon me, Ashbery, Bush, Gass, Melville, Garcia, all in four days. Was a bleggal blessing in Maine on vacation, fuck me if I know what I'm going to do with them now I'm home. Both reasons we didn't go to Maine are doing better enough

2025: Day late, if not by design also not by dereliction - out early yesterday for a long hike on Great Wass, by time I could have I decided to wait for this morning. 

Whatever few thoughts I had of the IHTWTGADTLWLIPTD tattoo now gone, nothing to do with Ashbery, from whose *Collected Early Poems, 1956-1987* I read a poem a day and whose *Some Trees* will be read front to back in Michigan this Fall, but with me: it's just a performance I don't want to enact and display on body. Lot of that going around every aspect of daily shit, starting to seep in here too, here's hoping, here's hoping not. Will this blog, will I, be here in two years for Ashbery's centenary?

2026 - We did not go to Maine this year, dammit, went to Leelanau Peninsula of Michigan instead. Past June I found a first edition of *Hotel Lautreamont* (where Vaucanson is from) at Second Story Used Book on Parklawn and reread it front to back when in Michigan a month ago, chills still

  

LATE ECHO

Alone with our madness and favorite flower
We see that there really is nothing left to write about.
Or rather, it is necessary to write about the same old things
In the same way, repeating the same things over and over
For love to continue and be gradually different.

   

Beehives and ants have to be re-examined eternally
And the color of the day put in
Hundreds of times and varied from summer to winter
For it to get slowed down to the pace of an authentic
Saraband and huddle there, alive and resting.

  

Only then can the chronic inattention
Of our lives drape itself around us, conciliatory
And with one eye on those long tan plush shadows
That speak so deeply into our unprepared knowledge
Of ourselves, the talking engines of our day.

Click ASHBERY for LOTS! of his poems. 

VAUCANSON

John Ashbery

It was snowing as he wrote.
In the gray room he felt relaxed and singular,
But no one, of course, ever trusts these moods.

There had to be understanding to it.
Why, though? That always happens anyway,
And who gets the credit for it? Not what is understood,
Presumably, and it diminishes us
In our getting to know it.

As trees come to know a storm
Until it passes and light falls anew
Unevenly, on all the muttering kinship:
Things with things, persons with objects,
Ideas with people or ideas.

It hurts, this wanting to give a dimension
To life when life is precisely that dimension.
We are creatures, therefore we walk and talk
And people come up to us, or listen
And then move away.

Music fills the spaces
Where figures are pulled to the edges,
And it can only say something.

Sinews are loosened then,
The mind begins to think good thoughts.
Ah, this sun must be good:
Doing a number, completing its trilogy.
Life must be back there. You hid it
So no one could find it
And now you can't remember where.

But if one were to invent being a child again
It might just come close enough to being a living relic
To save this thing, save it from embarrassment
By ringing down the curtain,

And for a few seconds no one would notice.
The ending would seem perfect.
No feelings to dismay,
No tragic sleep to wake from in a fit
Of passionate guilt, only the warm sunlight
That slides easily down shoulders
To the soft, melting heart.


LIGHT TURNOUTS

Dear ghost, what shelter
in the noonday crowd? I'm going to write
an hour, then read
what someone else has written.

You're no mansion for this to happen in.
But your adventures are like safe houses
your knowing where to stop an adventure
of another order, like seizing the weather.

We too are embroiled in this scene of happening,
and when we speak the same phrase together:
"We used to have one of those,"

it matters like a shot in the dark.

One of us stays behind.
One of us advances on the bridge
as on a carpet. Life - it's marvelous -
follows and falls behind.