Deseret for John Ashbery
Out here someone else is thinking of you,
turning now towards you, to the west
and away. Your table has been set—and that’s scary, why not?
But the nominations have begun and soon you’ll substitute yourself
in doorways, and on stairs
when these hillsides burst in flames. It’s like
tearing the sky with your nipple and then walking back into the scene,
to the wound in the house, to the sink. Blue clouds
rush on through your skull, in the windows
of blood in your throat. Daylight throbs, just out of reach,
there at the lip of your stumps
while behind you, deep in the house, tools as solemn as kids
reassert themselves in the carpeted light
that sleeps beneath tables and chairs.
This house has been you all along
but soon it’s bedtime for vision and sound.
Still, as long as it’s there you will want it,
will want to be in it, to see it,
to touch the blue tub and have been.
And so, in the bath (where they’ll find you one day,
your own mouth stuffed with cool blood)
you pushed open the window and glazed off into space
filled up with blips and new lanes. The world that you see
is just so nearby; one is almost
always surrounded, so that it is almost perfectly safe
and you can open your eyes and still breathe.
Meanwhile, out here, we listen for your breath
like the bodies in songs where no one is home. It’s like
turning with your throat in that memory of the house
when already we’re inside touching the coats.
But this, you’ll never know, you say turning twice away
and then opening the car so the music all spilled out.
So that nothing, or the land, can whistle, or be said,
now the cars all went away in a blast of seeds and dust.
This excitement leads you again to the house
where you’ll find your own head, borrowed in glass,
neglected, transpired and waiting to act,
to greet you again with the holes of your face.
The light flecks on your eyes are like fingers on skin
tracing cloud shapes on backs, as they stretch out and pass.
Let this be our city, weaving the light, in the light,
on our backs, in beds, facing up.
-Anthony McCann from I am the dead, who, you take care of me (forthcoming in 2023 from Wave Books)
Anthony McCann is the author of five volumes of poetry including I am the dead, who, you take care of me and Thing Music. His non-fiction prose work, Shadowlands—on the 2016 armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge—was a finalist for the California Book Award and the Reading the West Award. Anthony is the current director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the California Institute of the Arts. He lives with this family in the Mojave Desert.
The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifty-Eight): Anthony McCann
Anthony McCann’s powerful “Deseret for John Ashbery” brings home the constant interaction between us, creatures of body, and our environs: cars, city, seeds, lights, glass, spilled music. “This house has been you all along,” the poem says, as part of its careful, scarifying trail of recognitions, the more real for their surreality.
The poem’s second-person address both underscores its urgency and sweeps us into its subject, identifying us with him. This is not like Auden saying of Yeats, “he became his admirers.” Ashbery has, in a sense, always been one with the reader. He did not imagine his thoughts and their movement as different from others’. Indeed, his work can be a seen as a rolling stream of thoughts with no specific owner, as language has no specific owner, the lack of such constituting its great beauty.
“Deseret,” conflation of “desert” and “desire,” is a Mormon term for “promised land.” Ashbery, no Mormon, was also no stranger to land with promises. He spoke of New York City as a ‘large empty space’ ideal for art. He also liked to attach beautiful, arcane words to places, as in his poem title, “These Lacustrine Cities.”
Ashbery grew up on fruitful land. Land with fruit trees. The cover of Karin Roffman’s brilliant biography of his early life, The Songs We Know Best, shows him among branches of a cherry tree, picking its fruit. The origins of the New York School of Poets were pastoral. Its poets came from elsewhere, with three of its big four harvested from Harvard. When they formed their friendships the United States was still in large part a country of small farms. The city still drew on the countryside for power and bounty.
As we know, depredations made against the natural world by large-scale commerce, including industrial farming and human-caused climate change, have drained beauty and usefulness from the nature we control. It is beyond Ironic that America began and grew through the expulsion of aboriginal inhabitants who knew how to prosper without disemboweling nature. Our question is now, as Robert Frost put it, “what to make of a diminished thing.”
Like all human environments, the poem is a constant interchange between the natural and the manufactured. As Ralph Waldo Emerson pointed out, the original of the umbrella is the tree. And what are houses but groves? The wood of them planed and calibrated, but still of the earth.
The poem begins by creating distance. It starts outside of Ashbery, imagining him imagined—as a kind of frontier? “Your table has been set” sounds Biblical and fatalistic, but is undercut by the folksiness of “and that’s scary—why not?” The business-as-usual tone of “But the nominations have begun” turns into a run of surreal transformations through which the poem’s Ashbery persists:
. . . and soon you’ll substitute yourself
in doorways, and on stairs
when these hillsides burst in flames. It’s like
tearing the sky with your nipple and then walking back into the scene,
to the wound in the house, to the sink. Blue clouds
rush on through your skull, in the windows
of blood in your throat. Daylight throbs, just out of reach,
there at the lip of your stumps
while behind you, deep in the house, tools as solemn as kids
reassert themselves in the carpeted light
that sleeps beneath tables and chairs.
This house has been you all along
but soon it’s bedtime for vision and sound.
“This house has been you all along” is signal. It diverges from Rainer Maria Rilke’s “He who has no house now will never have one.” Where we live is who we are, and our deaths do not change that. Our surround sees through us in our corporeality: “Blue clouds // rush on through your skull, in the windows / of blood in your throat.”
Every poem, I believe, balances clarity and mystery. Here the balance swings toward mystery. In a mysterious way, its emphasis on touch reassures and grounds.
Still, as long as it’s there you will want it,
will want to be in it, to see it,
to touch the blue tub and have been.
With “Meanwhile, out here, we listen for your breath / like the bodies in songs where no one is home,” a hungry collective enters the poem. How beautiful and ghostly, these lines.
The poem’s final exhortation, “Let this be our city,” begs franchise yet continues to a posture of—what? Capitulation? Acceptance? The poem ends with us “. . . weaving the light, in the light, / on our backs, in beds, facing up.” We are prostrate and open. So much feeling shimmers within the poem’s last three phrases and their brief syllables that pinion us to the house we have returned to, led by the “that memory of the house / when already we’re inside touching the coats.”
I have barely touched on the strange passion that “Ashbery,” “you,” and “we” undergo(es) in the poem. The effect it creates is highly personal, and the idea comes that perhaps our sense of the world has been dulled and distracted by impersonality, by abstraction and summary, ravenous forces that eat us out of house and home.
Anthony McCann’s ambitious, luminous poem, “Deseret for John Ashbery,” is both homage and home. It opens, harrows, and scatters our sense of belonging; and the humility it ends with feels like the beginning of wisdom. – Angela Ball
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Author: Angela Ball
