Diarist: John Ashbery

I discovered John Ashbery at Barnes and Noble in Ala Moana Mall. Of course, I had heard his name and wasn't the first person to "discover" Ashbery. But I had only heard his name in the genre of poets I should have already known, poets who were so important my ignorance was unheard of. I walked the two miles from my ship to the closest bookstore along Nimitz Highway, losing myself in the bright Hawaiian heat and my thoughts. The industrial, dusty ports turned into downtown blocks turned into the border between old and new: Kaka'ako, Ala Moana Beach, and the mall opened into new beginnings. When I arrived at the air-conditioned entrance to the bookstore I felt a marked difference between where I had come from and where I'd arrived.

I didn't really know who John Ashbery was. The only poets I knew were the ones I researched, read, and studied myself--often obsesively copying their style moves, experimenting with their forms, figuring out what work they made as early career poets. I worshipped them. I wanted to know all their secrets.

When I saw Ashbery's Library of America Collected Works on the shelf, the name stuck out to me. I was tracing my lineage through another living poet, trying to figure out who I needed to study, what I needed to learn about my own writing. I already had an armful of books (when I worked on the ship, I always brought or acquired stacks of books to last my three-month-long hitches) but I picked it up.

It was August 20, 2017. I walked across the highway to be closer to the ocean and began reading John Ashbery right away, immediately feeling a ghostly kinship to his words. I didn't know him, but I felt that I knew him. Poetry is dangerous in that way; the reader and the speaker both imagine intimacies that exist in their bones but not in the air above the ocean. Two weeks later, to the day, John Ashbery died.

~~~~~

Cold Pastoral

for John Ashbery




We only met two weeks 

before you died. I hardly  

knew you,




but now I feel cold seeds 

of weeds blowing in the wind 

inside a black, curbed bag’s




false burial.





I only cried two times,

just two, for my own mother.  

Why would I cry for you?




Why would I cry for a man?

A man I hardly knew.




The petals of forgotten vegetation

in a sidewalk crack are smiling

through their tears.




I cannot bear their grins.





The shrubs are perfectly molded,

still, and stuck in time.




The blades of a sun beaten

weed-wacker will keep them trimmed forever




in our yesterdays.  The days

I did not know you.





The edge of a farm, where 

a highway rushes past




at night, the headlights

blinding.




A cold pastoral, the end


of stories still untold.




The speaker smells the rot of trimmings

in his voice, and knows




he should have been in love.





Two weeks ago I met you,

but now you are dead.




I will only cry two times

for you.  By then,




your ashes will be planted, yet again.

*This poem is titled after a story of the same name by Marina Keegan

~~~~~

26 August 2018

Returning to Hawaii—to Honolulu, specifically—is eerie. I don’t know whether to be grateful, ecstatic, or terrified. I have always loved the comfort of familiar things, but so much has changed since last summer, and I have always hated change. Small differences irk me. The difference is in myself mostly. Last summer in Honolulu I started reading poetry differently. I started understanding it. I realized as a living human, I am just as powerful as any other poet. I am a poet. It is my birthright. But even that profound and beautiful orange summer, where I found Ashbery and cried with emotion, is tinged. Dark. Shadow. There was a hurricane that just missed Oahu, and all the shopping centers closed before they realized it was going to miss Honolulu. The gloom is powerful. It barely rained, but the clouds rolled over like smoke.

27 August 2018

I’m really lazy and impatient, even in my writing. Last hitch when I did the Artist’s Way I couldn’t fill three morning pages. I’d stop at two. A free write for seven minutes? How about four instead? It’s hard to either get into a writing frame of minor remove the blocks and just let the words flow. I’m working on it with this pages now: my own morning pages. Setting aside time to free write each morning. What’s the difference between journalling and free writing? Sometimes nothing. Sometimes everything. I’m not free writing about my days, that’s for sure. Walking along Ala Moana Beach with a new poet, my feet lapped by the waves, me fully dressed, the poet’s spine cracked open, the dim light of late afternoon, the muggy air humid and sticking to my arms, the sand between my sandals and the bottom of my feet. What more is there to wish for? The salt of the ocean smells like Ashbery to me. Still can’t focus for long, so I walk. I’ll read a line at a time and let the ocean flow between them. I wiggle my drowning toes. Meaning is lost, but new tones are created inside white spaces.

~~~~~

What the trees didn’t tell us, we are

I pretended not to know what you meant

when you emailed me asking:

Was it a dream? You would wake up

tomorrow and I would be in your bed,

the warm presence of my body rooting

into the mattress, the steam of my breath

forking into green sparks. Presence.

I gave you what you wanted. Was I real?

I remember that email when I walk down

Madison towards Elliot Bay.

On the one way street, empty branches

and towering buildings take me

step by step down the hill. From here

it seems the road ends under the water,

so blue and so still, just like it did

this time last year. Winter mornings.

A skyscraper is obscured by the arms

of a dead tree. Its reflection

shows in the glass of another building.

A skyscraper is only as tall as a city lets it.

I look through the branches and see

how blue the windows, straight at it.

The shadows of where leaves should be.

Even manmade things feel natural.

Nobody ever really wants nothing

from anyone else.

*The title of this poem is after a line from “Some Trees” by John Ashbery