a blog of found things: words, art, photography, disappointment & hope
Words are all we have
I tell you this, you tell me that.
We order a cream tea, I watch your hand
reach for the bowl and hesitate,
as if what’s sweet might turn to sand.
I tell you in exotic banter
of a poem where flowers close.
Blossoms, I tell you, in deep winter
bloom, undaunted, out of loss.
The stops like stars ignite the tracks.
You touch my hair as if it’s smoke
reflected in the window backwards
and the day that’s come and gone.
How I think about her now is how
a thought is said to cross the mind:
like a bird’s shadow as it flies,
dragging its span in darkness along the ground.
These are amazing: each
Joining a neighbor, as though speech
Were a still performance.
Arranging by chance
To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it, you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try
To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.
And glad not to have invented
Such comeliness, we are surrounded:
A silence already filled with noises,
A canvas on which emerges
A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.
– John Ashbery
The noise is always just a thought away,
one wrong turning of the mind. I hear the cries
(they’re mine) at the foot of a stair,
the end of a supermarket aisle,
and then it washes over in a tide of loss. All
gives way to chaos, or to what is always there:
that locked-out self that treads its mill of grief
waiting for his dying to die down.
What is it now with me
And is it as I have become?
Is there no state free from the boundary lines
Of before and after? The window is open today
And the air pours in with piano notes
In its skirts, as though to say, ‘Look, J,
I’ve brought these and these’ – that is
A few Beethovens, some Brahmses,
A few choice Poulenc notes. . . Yes,
It is being free again, the air, it has to keep coming back
Because that’s all its good for.
I want to stay with it out of fear
That keeps me from walking up certain steps,
Knocking at certain doors, fear of growing old
Alone, and of finding no one at the evening end
Of the path except another myself
Nodding a curt greeting: ‘Well, you’ve been awhile
But now we’re back together, which is what counts.’
Air in my path, you could shorten this,
But the breeze has dropped, and silence is the last word.
– (After John Ashbery)
I’ll bet you think the room was bare.
Wrong. There was a chair with a sturdy back.
A lamp, good for fighting the dark.
A table, and on the table a telephone, and I don’t remember what.
A bookcase and an open door.
And an address book in a drawer.
You think our addresses weren’t in it?
No books, no pictures, no windows, you guess?
Wrong. A comforting Encyclopedia Britannica
nestled in the shelves.
Mahler and his Resurrection.
Joy the spark of gods.
Churchill stretched on a shelf in life-giving sleep
after the labours of the War.
The moralists with the golden syllables of their names
inscribed on finely tanned spines.
Next to them, the Spy’s braced their backs.
No way out? But what about that door?
No prospects? The window had other views.
His one foot still on the chair.
And one fly buzzed – that is, was still alive.
You think at least the note could tell us something.
But what if I say there was no note –
and he had so many who loved him, but all of us fit neatly
inside the empty envelope propped up against a cup.
An evening like any other. Nothing
to tell me you were present in the world.
I received no notification
I could have missed you
I could have gone home that evening,
fallen ill, met another instead of you
Someone else would have taken me that night
Isn’t it better to be made of stone?
Or am I glad it was you?
It’s better to be grass
People mow it, weed it and
it grows wild again, never the same
memoryhouse 