The Double Dream of Spring by John Ashbery

Author:John Ashbery [Ashbery, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781480459182
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Published: 2014-01-10T20:35:00+00:00

Parergon

We are happy in our way of life.

It doesn’t make much sense to others. We sit about,

Read, and are restless. Occasionally it becomes time

To lower the dark shade over it all.

Our entity pivots on a self-induced trance

Like sleep. Noiseless our living stops

And one strays as in a dream

Into those respectable purlieus where life is motionless and alive

To utter the few words one knows:

“O woebegone people! Why so much crying,

Such desolation in the streets?

Is it the present of flesh, that each of you

At your jagged casement window should handle,

Nervous unto thirst and ultimate death?

Meanwhile the true way is sleeping;

Your lawful acts drink an unhealthy repose

From the upturned lip of this vessel, secretly,

But it is always time for a change.

That certain sins of omission go unpunished

Does not weaken your position

But this underbrush in which you are secure

Is its doing. Farewell then,

Until, under a better sky

We may meet expended, for just doing it

Is only an excuse. We need the tether

Of entering each other’s lives, eyes wide apart, crying.”

As one who moves forward from a dream

The stranger left that house on hastening feet

Leaving behind the woman with the face shaped like an arrowhead,

And all who gazed upon him wondered at

The strange activity around him.

How fast the faces kindled as he passed!

It was a marvel that no one spoke

To stem the river of his passing

Now grown to flood proportions, as on the sunlit mall

Or in the enclosure of some court

He took his pleasure, savage

And mild with the contemplating.

Yet each knew he saw only aspects,

That the continuity was fierce beyond all dream of enduring,

And turned his head away, and so

The lesson eddied far into the night:

Joyful its beams, and in the blackness blacker still,

Though undying joyousness, caught in that trap.

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