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    A Wave: Poems
    A Wave: Poems
    A Wave: Poems
    Ebook131 pages2 hours

    A Wave: Poems

    By John Ashbery

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    One of Ashbery’s most acclaimed and beloved collections since Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, filled with his signature wit and generous intelligence

    The poems in John Ashbery’s award-winning 1984 collection A Wave address the impermanence of language, the nature of mortality, and the fluidity of consciousness—matters of life and death that in other hands might run the risk of sentimentality. For John Ashbery, however, these considerations provide an opportunity to display his prodigious poetic gifts: the unerring ear for our evolving modern language and its ever-expanding universe of meanings, the fierce eye trained on glimmers underwater, and the wry humor that runs through observations both surprising and familiar. As the poem “The Path to the White Moon” has it, “We know what is coming, that we are moving / Dangerously and gracefully / Toward the resolution of time / Blurred but alive with many separate meanings / Inside this conversation.” The long title poem of A Wave, which closes the book, is considered one of Ashbery’s most distinguished works, praised by critic Helen Vendler for its “genius for a free and accurate American rendition of very elusive inner feelings, and especially for transitive states between feelings.”
     
    Winner of both the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the Bollingen Prize, this book is one to be read, reread, and remembered.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateSep 9, 2014
    ISBN9781480459083
    A Wave: Poems
    Author

    John Ashbery

    <p><strong>John Ashbery </strong>was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. He wrote more than twenty books of poetry, including <em>Quick Question; Planisphere; Notes from the Air; A Worldly Country; Where Shall I Wander; </em>and <em>Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, </em>which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. The winner of many prizes and awards, both nationally and internationally, he received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation in 2011 and a National Humanities Medal, presented by President Obama at the White House, in 2012. Ashbery died in September 2017 at the age of ninety.</p>

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      Book preview

      A Wave - John Ashbery

      At North Farm

      Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,

      At incredible speed, traveling day and night,

      Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.

      But will he know where to find you,

      Recognize you when he sees you,

      Give you the thing he has for you?

      Hardly anything grows here,

      Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,

      The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.

      The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;

      Birds darken the sky. Is it enough

      That the dish of milk is set out at night,

      That we think of him sometimes,

      Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?

      Rain Moving In

      The blackboard is erased in the attic

      And the wind turns up the light of the stars,

      Sinewy now. Someone will find out, someone will know.

      And if somewhere on this great planet

      The truth is discovered, a patch of it, dried, glazed by the sun,

      It will just hang on, in its own infamy, humility. No one

      Will be better for it, but things can’t get any worse.

      Just keep playing, mastering as you do the step

      Into disorder this one meant. Don’t you see

      It’s all we can do? Meanwhile, great fires

      Arise, as of haystacks aflame. The dial has been set

      And that’s ominous, but all your graciousness in living

      Conspires with it, now that this is our home:

      A place to be from, and have people ask about.

      The Songs We Know Best

      Just like a shadow in an empty room

      Like a breeze that’s pointed from beyond the tomb

      Just like a project of which no one tells—

      Or didja really think that I was somebody else?

      Your clothes and pantlegs lookin’ out of shape

      Shape of the body over which they drape

      Body which has acted in so many scenes

      But didja ever think of what that body means?

      It is an organ and a vice to some

      A necessary evil which we all must shun

      To others an abstraction and a piece of meat

      But when you’re looking out you’re in the driver’s seat!

      No man cares little about fleshly things

      They fill him with a silence that spreads in rings

      We wish to know more but we are never sated

      No wonder some folks think the flesh is overrated!

      The things we know now all got learned in school

      Try to learn a new thing and you break the rule

      Our knowledge isn’t much it’s just a small amount

      But you feel it quick inside you when you’re down for the count

      You look at me and frown like I was out of place

      I guess I never did much for the human race

      Just hatched some schemes on paper that looked good at first

      Sat around and watched until the bubble burst

      And now you’re lookin’ good all up and down the line

      Except for one thing you still have in mind

      It’s always there though often with a different face

      It’s the worm inside the jumping bean that makes it race

      Too often when you thought you’d be showered with confetti

      What they flung at you was a plate of hot spaghetti

      You’ve put your fancy clothes and flashy gems in hock

      Yet you pause before your father’s door afraid to knock

      Once you knew the truth it tried to set you free

      And still you stood transfixed just like an apple tree

      The truth it came and went and left you in the lurch

      And now you think you see it from your lofty perch

      The others come and go they’re just a dime a dozen

      You react to them no more than to a distant cousin

      Only a few people can touch your heart

      And they too it seems have all gotten a false start

      In twilight the city with its hills shines serene

      And lets you make of it more than anything could mean

      It’s the same city by day that seems so crude and calm

      You’ll have to get to know it not just pump its arm

      Even when that bugle sounded loud and clear

      You knew it put an end to all your fear

      To all that lying and the senseless mistakes

      And now you’ve got it right and you know what it takes

      Someday I’ll look you up when we’re both old and gray

      And talk about those times we had so far away

      How much it mattered then and how it matters still

      Only things look so different when you’ve got a will

      It’s true that out of this misunderstanding could end

      And men would greet each other like they’d found a friend

      With lots of friends around there’s no one to entice

      And don’t you think seduction isn’t very nice?

      It carries in this room against the painted wall

      And hangs in folds of curtains when it’s not there at all

      It’s woven in the flowers of the patterned spread

      And lies and knows not what it thinks upon the bed

      I wish to come to know you get to know you all

      Let your belief in me and me in you stand tall

      Just like a project of which no one tells—

      Or do ya still think that I’m somebody else?

      When the Sun Went Down

      To have been loved once by someone—surely

      There is a permanent good in that,

      Even if we don’t know all the circumstances

      Or it happened too long ago to make any difference.

      Like almost too much sunlight or an abundance of sweet-sticky,

      Caramelized things—who can tell you it’s wrong?

      Which of the others on your team could darken the passive

      Melody that runs on, that has been running since the world began?

      Yet, to be strapped to one’s mindset, which seems

      As enormous as a plain, to have to be told

      That its horizons are comically confining,

      And all the sorrow wells from there, like the slanting

      Plume of a waterspout: doesn’t it supplant knowledge

      Of the different forms of love, reducing them

      To a white indifferent prism, a roofless love standing open

      To the elements? And some see in this a paradigm of how it rises

      Slowly to the indifferent heavens, all that pale glamour?

      The refrain is desultory as birdsong; it seeps unrecognizably

      Into the familiar structures that lead out from here

      To the still familiar peripheries and less sure notions:

      It already had its way. In time for evening relaxation.

      There are times when music steals a march on us,

      Is suddenly perplexingly nearer, flowing in my wrist;

      Is the true and dirty words you whisper nightly

      As the book closes like a collapsing sheet, a blur

      Of all kinds of connotations ripped from the hour and tossed

      Like jewels down a well; the answer, also,

      To the question that was on my mind but that I’ve forgotten,

      Except in the way certain things, certain nights, come together.

      Landscape

      (After Baudelaire)

      I want a bedroom near the sky, an astrologer’s cave

      Where I can fashion eclogues that are chaste and grave.

      Dreaming, I’ll hear the wind in the steeples close by

      Sweep the solemn hymns away. I’ll spy

      On factories from my attic window, resting my chin

      In both hands, drinking in the songs, the din.

      I’ll see chimneys and steeples, those masts of the city,

      And the huge sky that makes us dream of eternity.

      How sweet to watch the birth of the star in the still-blue

      Sky, through mist; the lamp burning anew

      At the window; rivers of coal climbing the firmament

      And the moon pouring out its pale enchantment.

      I’ll see the spring, the summer and the fall

      And when winter casts its monotonous pall

      Of

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