John Ashbery.

Mcgrath, Campbell

That such expression could manifest as variously as light
In a garment of consciousness poses the maker
His first and signal task:
The puzzle of surfaces. How not to recognize this
Face in the mirror, this stream of irreconcilable representations
Flown beyond formal posture to assume
Human dimension, blue-bundled baby or fey homunculus
Sporting dubious headgear,
Mannequin in turban or tea-colored bowler
By turns herculean, effluvial, devout and glib.
Thus to begin

Shearing cross-grain the cheap yard

Goods is one
Approach, gabardine snood
In light melon, form following superficial function,
Hooded, neighborly,
An exercise in mimetic evocation. Or

The manufacture of wallpaper, swaths and swatches
Of linen meringue organza and lovely taffeta ostrich skin
Stretched like a gallery of Monet astigmatisms
In the Louvre, a penny candy attic of Puvis de Chavannes
In the Louvre. We are always in the Louvre,
Even when we are in Madrid
Spooning pomegranate sorbet. Seeds and myth
At the grand masque of solace, after which renunciation
Tosses her nuptial bouquet into the lion pit,
A gown of raw silk, oceans of the various
Polymer constituencies, seen and worn, the inhabited
And fabricated, artifice bending its elbow joint
To devise a solution beyond the capacity of the present
Tense to model, as the lightbulb's pewter skull
Reflecting the spewn embers of dawn becomes
A figure for memory remembering itself,
Spark of cognition drawn through time's filament
Into flame. We were like that once, burning,
Aglow, transfigured by vistas of clouds and chimneys,
Mossy terracotta where the old urn o'erspills
In a pantomime of surreptitious greed and surrender,
Going through and around, curvilinear, not unplanned for,
Not given to compassion. These astonishing balloons
In the sunrise are feelings, sentimental orbs.
What happens to them assumes the capacity to move
Or to destroy us, severity being a species of fulfillment.
So to find our way toward an untarnished modality,
Lush plateaux above the river, tables on the square
Beneath caroling bells, florid stemware,
odor of bossy lemons.

But the battle of the seraphic robots
Continues throughout the rainy afternoon
Dismantling the haberdasher's machinery
And nothing can survive it. The finite gleams
Like a revolution in which no goose is cooked,
No rhetoric suborned. Prepared for violent change

The Emperor is crowned with a plastic lobster
While venality totes its own baggage to the depot,
A species of checkroom where what we carry creates
Visceral anxiety, the pain of a phantom limb
Bumped against a sequence of abandoned furnishings
Which are also schools of thought,
An ottoman called Ethics, end tables known as
The Moral Sciences, and so on, and so forth.
Even the river in the foothills resembles a rayon nosegay
Stressed to the point of infarction, glorious
Dialect of a lost tribe of Dutch uncles,
Contemptuous of the harbor lights, yawls and ketches,
Lateen-rigged dinghies so like a cartoonish Mesopotamia,
Links in a dismal chain of indigo inks
From which causality has fled like a rabbit from a hat
Or rats from the ruins of Troy, New York.
Real ruins. Cairns of rubble, sublime
Nuts and bolts, spiked corollas of concertina
Wire, shards, odd morsels, remnants
Wrapped in newspaper dotted with obituaries
And cantaloupe rind.

So long, at last, to all that
Sorry sheen.

Our small war is over.
Those brash materials, diagrams inscribed upon the dome,
Galaxies burning the ice-blue color of ideas,
The realization that they have constellated us, too,
Fashioned us in their glittering image,
To envision which is to know
The grace of the bare-naked lovers
Enacting their passion in the window display
Of the department store at midnight.
Like chocolate poured into silver molds
Beauty seeks its level everywhere,
In coins and kisses, rabbits and stars,
Forming and delimiting whatever can be
Imagined, or spoken, or made, here
Amid the tenebrous, wind-funneled snowflakes at dusk,
Here in the half-demolished metropolis of rhetoric and desire.