John Ashbery's Night

[Photo: Big Frank Dickinson]

Big Frank has been reading "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" by John Ashbery. a great book of poetry. There is much too much to comment on in a single post and Asbery's words are so much more interesting than Big Frank's so let's read some. Ashbery writes of the confusion that the say brings; how difficult it is to bring meaning into your life through conscious effort using words that have so many holes in them. Night however, is a different situation. Here's what Ashbery has to say on night in this collection of poetry.

"....... you have slept in the sun

Longer than the sphinx and are none the wiser for it,

Come in. And I thought I saw a shadow fall across the door

But it was only her come to ask once more

If I was coming in, and not to hurry in case I wasn't.

The night sheen takes over. A moon of cistercian pallor

Has climbed to the center of heaven, installed,

Finally involved with the business of darkness.

And a sign heaves from all the small things on earth,

The books, the papers, the old garters and union suit buttons

Kept in a white cardboard box somewhere, and all the lower

Version of cities flattened under the equalizing night.

The summer demands and takes away too much,

But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes.

From "As One Put Drunk Into the Packet Boat" ~ John Ashbery

out of night the token emerges

its leaves like birds alighting all at once under a tree

taken up and shaken again

put down in weak rage

knowing as the brain does it can never come about

not here not yesterday in the past

only in the gaps of today filling itself

as emptiness is distributed

in the idea of what time it is

when that time is already past

From "As You Came from the Holy Land" ~ John Ashbery