John Ashbery近两三年发表的诗歌

王敖

MORDRED


By John Ashbery


Now I have neither back nor front.
I am the way certain persons are
who never tell you how they are
yet you know they are like you and they are.

I was preternaturally wise
but it was spring, there was no one to care or do.
It was spring and the sprinklers were on.

Bay, indentation, viscous rocks
that are somebody\'s pleasure. Pleasures that don\'t go away
but don\'t exactly stay,
stay the way they were meant to be.
I caught a winged one,
looked it firmly in the eyes:
What is your surmise? Oh, I only like living on,
the rest isn\'t so important to me,
not at all, if you wish.
But I do, I said. Then, well, it\'s like a clearing
in the darkness that you can\'t see. Darkness is meant for all of us.
We grow used to it. Then daylight comes again.
That\'s what I mean when I say about living
it could be going on, going somewhere else,
but it\'s not, it\'s here, more or less.
You have to champion it, then it fights for you,
but that isn\'t necessary. It will go on living anyway.
I say do you mind I\'m getting tired.

But there is one last thing I must know about you.
Do you remember a midnight forge
around which crept the ghosts of lepers, who were blacksmiths
in a time persistently unidentifiable, and then you went like this?
You remember how the hammer fell slowly
taking all that song with you.
You remember the music of the draught horses
they could only make against a wall.
All right, how little does it all cost you then?
You were a school child, now you are past middle age,
and the great drawing hasn\'t occurred.

I see I must be going.
I just like living,
only like living.
Sometime you must tell me of your intentions,
but now I have to stay here on this fast track
in case the provisions come along
which I won\'t need, being a living, breathing creature.
But I asked you about your hat.
Oh yes well it is important to have a hat.




RANDOM JOTTINGS OF AN OLD MAN
By John Ashbery

Like a fool, I let him into my house,
and he began dropping jottings everywhere.
Where once crepe paper flowers had been,
jottings overflowed the basin into the water closet.

Urban affairs had kept him—
something about a rendezvous with kelp. "Hurry,
the paths of nature are creeping
to the corrugated tooth. And it\'s a blitz of old stars,
tonight!" Something in me leaned into the vacant door frame.
It was a still life of bottles and a jar
that once had held cold cream. We mustn\'t wait here
for him, that\'s what he wants, and
if we do so he\'ll want to eat us up.

No more us to be with in the morning,
among the cups and shards. No more sticky places on the railing.
We held hands there too, once, for years, watching the
palms move out into the harbor.
The pianola never recovered from the loss.

And today the air is bright again and fresh with twigs.
No mourners were sighted on the post road.
He came down to us with relaxed meaning in his grin,
cudgeled, cajoled us, told us breezy stories
about a widow in the henhouse.

After all regrets have been pocketed, the counter wiped clean
of terrible fingerprints, assuredly one moves westward
into sheepherding country. The ranchers won\'t like it,
but they\'ll let us live, closer to dying
than many insects are now, attracted by the chiming and gleams of the cash register.
Other oaths, other options will follow
in the wake of spring.

Millions of mullions waken, gesticulate to us.



CROSSROADS IN THE PAST
By John Ashbery
That night the wind stirred in the forsythia bushes,
but it was a wrong one, blowing in the wrong direction.
"That\'s silly. How can there be a wrong direction?
\'It bloweth where it listeth,\' as you know, just as we do
when we make love or do something else there are no rules for."

I tell you, something went wrong there a while back.
Just don\'t ask me what it was. Pretend I\'ve dropped the subject.
No, now you\'ve got me interested, Iwant to know
exactly what seems wrong to you, how something could

seem wrong to you. In what way do things get to be wrong?
I\'m sitting here dialing my cellphone
with one hand, digging at some obscure pebbles with my shovel
with the other. And then something like braids will stand out,

on horsehair cushions. That armchair is really too lugubrious.
We\'ve got to change all the furniture, fumigate the house,
talk our relationship back to its beginnings. Say, you know
that\'s probably what\'s wrong—the beginnings concept, I mean.
I aver there are no beginnings, though there were perhaps some
sometime. We\'d stopped, to look at the poster the movie theater

had placed freestanding on the sidewalk. The lobby cards
drew us in. It was afternoon, we found ourselves
sitting at the end of a row in the balcony; the theater was unexpectedly
crowded. That was the day we first realized we didn\'t fully
know our names, yours or mine, and we left quietly
amid the gray snow falling. Twilight had already set in.





HONORED GUEST
By John Ashbery

Accept these nice things we have no use for:
polished twilight, mix of clouds and sun,
minnows in a stream. There may come a time
we\'ll need them. They\'re yours forever,
or another dream leaves you thirsty,
waking. You can\'t see the table
or the bread. How about a clean, unopened letter
and the smell of toast?

School has closed today—it\'s raining.
The calendar has backed up or been reversed
so the days have no least common denominator.
Anyway, it was fun, trying to figure out
who you were, what it was that led you to us.
Was it the smell of camphor? Or an ad
in an out-of-state newspaper, seeking news
of someone who disappeared long ago?
He was in uniform, and leaned against a car,
smiling at a girl who seemed to shade her eyes from him.
Can it be? Candace, was it you? There\'s no way
she\'ll look our way again.

What can I tell you? Everything\'s been locked up
for the night, I couldn\'t get it for you
if I wanted to. But there must be some way—
it\'s drizzling, the lamps along the path are weeping,
wanting to show you this tremendous thing,
boxed in forever, always getting closer.