On facing pages in Ashbery

..
I saw you waiting for a streetcar and pressed forward.
Alas, you were only a child in armor. Now when ribald toasts
sail round a table too fair laid out, why the consequences
are only dust, disease and old age. Pleasant memories
are just that. So I channel whatever
into my contingency, a vein of mercury
that keeps breaking out, higher up, more on time
every time. Dirndls spotted with obsolete flowers,
worn in the city again, promote open discussion.

I am almost always looking
for themes to break down
to further my research
into backward climes of noon alienation and majesty.


One, a little farther than here, resonates today with unusual candor: my own take on the disheveled
frankness we all inhabit
at one time or another. 


Backing away from tribal sunshine
so as to inhabit a no doubt intact compunction of one's own.




____


It's not possible, it's not dignified, willfully to forget. I think it is just incredibly marvelous that someone, quietly, at Harper Collins thought to juxtapose these poems on facing pages; in recip-rocating voices they portray a rich and earnest dialogue between avatars of one alertly moral mind, yet one more at home with Eric Rohmer than Robert Bresson. "Friday night," addressed by name for the first time last week, is a prism, not a syndrome; an exam, a preceptorial, a "research" whose backstop one has never seen more exactly staged or phrased, than in the final lines of the second poem.


This blog will find its level. In the meantime, one has to dedicate this posting to RAD, who isn't unacquainted with tribal sunshine, and whose compunction is not cold.






John Ashbery
A Worldly Country
  (i)   Thrill of a Romance
  (ii)  A Litmus Tale
Harper Collins, 2007©


Hedi Slimane
Monochrome, Stephen Dorff 
Paris Vogue©
June, 2010