By John Ashbery
From “Houseboat Days”

Death kept dispatching and reaping
its tribute in sites and tombs:
man with dagger or with pocket,
at noon or in the nocturnal light,
hoped to kill, kept killing,
kept burying beings and branches,
murdering and devouring corpses.

He prepared his nets, wrung dry,
bled white, departed in the morning
smelling blood from the hunt,
and upon returning from the triumph he was shrouded
by fragments of death and abandonment,
and killing himself, he then buried
his tracks with sepulchral ceremony.

The homes of the living were dead.
Slag, broken roofs, urinals,
wormy alleyways, hovels
awash with human tears.
“You must live like this,” said the decree.
“Rot in your substance,” said the Foreman.
“You’re filthy,” reasoned the Church.
“Sleep in the mud,” they told you.
And some of them armed the ash
to govern and decide,
while the flower of mankind beat
against the walls built for them.

The Cemetery possessed pomp and stone.
Silence for all the stature
of lofty tapered vegetation.

At last you’re here, at least you leave
us a hollow in the heart of the bitter jungle,
at last you lie stiff between walls
that you won’t breach. And every day
the flowers, like a river of perfume,
joined the river of the dead.
The flowers untouched by life
fell on the hollow that you left.

Curtains Undrawn

Looking in windows down a night-time street
	In Winter, I don't feel
A voyeur, no, I only seem to meet
	Lives lived with love's good will.

There is a student with an angle-poise
	Lamp. He's hard at work
In happy concentration. There's no noise
	As yet and nothing's stark

Or ugly. I've a sense of neighborhood,
	Of being near yet keeping
A proper distance. Now I find it good
	To think of children sleeping

With night-lights on. No doubt their parents will
	Later go up to bed
And make love without speaking. There's a still
	Design within my head

As if I were about to write a score
	To fit these modest lives
Where there are quarrels sometimes but no more
	Than small ones which arrive

Because we are imperfect. I walk on
	Under a full moon's stare,
Knowing that elsewhere crimes are done -
	Not here, no, never here,

And 'here' is much more usual, I believe,
	Than war and hate and dread
Since here are still lives where the trust of love
	Will never be quite dead.

Say I am sentimental. I don't care.
	The rooted tree of trust
I know is always flowering somewhere
	Where people still are just.

Maybe they could not tell you what they think
	Their lives are all about.
Philosophies grow cold, most dogmas shrink
	Here where hope's not in doubt.

I only know Jennings for having read several dozen of her poems these last weeks. I feel a presumption of decency from her, a tranquil foundation wrenched gently asunder by her travels through poetry, the Bible, writings about the Bible, and philosophy. In Curtains Undrawn I expected a foreboding rumble under the placid presumptions, but I am biased by my natural inclinations toward emotional slosh. The line “Not here, no, never here” teased me into thinking she was taking this to a level of dismay or conflict, but she stayed the course of equilibrium.

I agree with her when she says “‘here’ is much more usual, I believe, Than war and hate and dread”, though I am skeptical that “the trust of love Will never be quite dead.” She finds pockets of decency, these paradises summoned from absence created by her voyeur-like glimpses into neighbors’ lives. Calmness at the base of things is foreign to me.

Another poem, A Chinese Sage, describes a poet who whittles away his excesses and obscurities of cleverness by making a peasant woman his mentor. Anything she did not understand was excised from his work and the result, presumably, was of serene universality. I like the poem but ask: Was serenity common among ancient peasants? Is it common among today’s homeless?

A Chinese Sage

	A Chinese sage once took every word distilled, altered and perfected
In private till for him it seemed a poem, yes he took this to a peasant woman,
	Read it to her softly and slowly and waited for her rough-voiced assurance that
Certain words she could understand, others were meaningless to her. Very discreetly
	But decisively, and with no arguments, this sage crossed out every word that was foreign to
A woman of simplicity who knew labours of the soil and the house, who had no
	Dealings other than this with poetry, art of any kind, yet by his

	Magnanimity, more, his humility, became his mentor, guided him
Out of all obscurity, not with wearying argument or even quiet coaxing, but by the fact
	That she was a world he could only enter through her. Hay, beds, crude meals, lust
Subdued his wit, bodied out his verse, cancelled cleverness. And, I ask, was he
	Most poet or most philosopher in this uncrowned wisdom, writing
In the reign of Charlamagne, paring simplicities to a peace no
	Emperor was ever enticed by or even dreamed of?

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A breeze off the lake–petal-shaped
Luna-park effects avoid the teasing outline
Of where we would be if we were here.
Bombed out of our minds, I think
The way here is too close, too packed
With surges of feeling. It can’t be.
The wipeout occurs first at the center,
now around the edges. A big ugly one
With braces kicking the shit out of a smaller one
Who reaches for a platinum axe stamped excalibur:
Just jungles really. The daytime bars are
Packed but night has more meaning
In the pockets and side vents. I feel as though
Somebody had just brought me an equation.
I say, "I can’t answer this–I know
That it’s true, please, believe me,
I can see the proof, lofty, invisible
In the sky far above the striped awnings. I just see
That I want it to go on, without
Anybody’s getting hurt, and for the shuffling
To resume between me and my side of the night."

John Ashbery

Mind’s heart, it must
be that some
truth lies locked
in you.

Or else, lies, all
lies, and no man
true enough to know
the difference.

Robert Creeley

Sometimes it is safe to do so but why let them lie there, dumb museum pieces, listless zoo creatures, captured.

I am guilty of that since youth: Laying ideas out and assuming they will spread on their own.

It is a seductive notion for me. I like that idea of a mental conspiracy where influence is not reached through publication or commodity but through the air, through the breath, through our consonant-less mutterings to self that cluck and stutter like impatient pigeons.

Let me explain my attraction to these lines:

I would like a simple life
Yet all night I am laying
Poems away in a long box.

It is my immortality box,
My lay-away plan,
my coffin.

        THE AMBITION BIRD
        Anne Sexton

A few years ago I picked up a book at Seaburn Books on Broadway. The book was Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles, but it could have been any book of a narrative genre. I had spent much of that day at the boneyard, reading tombstones, contemplating mortality and the way we remember each other.

Before stopping at the bookstore I came home to look for stories behind some of the burials I found that day.

Memory is something I will never grasp. The mechanical process, the machinations of remembering what to remember is a process littered by biases and unspoken anxiety. Memory is a critic. Memory is a filtered product. I thought about that as I spent the day wandering the paths of individuals’ lingering testaments and wrestling with random legacies.

Without articulating it to myself at the time I know now what I was thinking: How can I be remembered? How will I be recalled, if at all?

A somewhat irritating but enduring memory of a high school friend flew threw the open cage of my mind: A year or two after high school my friend from school for some reason pronounced that neither he nor I would be remembered by anybody else in our graduating class. Ever. He specifically singled out for scorn the idea that I would be remembered by anyone with whom we went to high school.

I think he was nervous about something.

When I opened to a middle chapter of Sheltering Sky, one of my day’s questions was answered: This is how someone lives forever. This is one way. Through the intricate code of words we share the energies and distortions that are our memories, and we wait for them to connect at random, thereby growing that mental conspiracy.

A simple, obvious observation that had escaped me for years.

Sexton writes of her "immortality box," reminding me of the gravestones I had seen at the cemetery that day. Her not-so-subtle demand for immortality, and my vaguely annoyed feeling that she very well attained that without having to articulate it, reminded me of that nearly mystical feeling of opening that book and feeling Paul Bowles step from the pages. "This," I thought, "is how to do it. This is how you live forever"

 I did not buy Sheltering Sky that day, because I already own a copy. Instead I bought Bowles’ Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue, an unimpressive volume which I might take another look at now that I think of it.

I would like a simple life
Yet all night I am laying
Poems away in a long box.

It is my immortality box,
My lay-away plan,
my coffin.

        THE AMBITION BIRD

Birds turn into plumber’s tools,
A sonnet turns into a dirty joke,
A wind turns into a tracheotomy,
A boat turns into a corpse,
A ribbon turns into a noose.

        THE HEX