Rivers and Mountains

Poems

John Ashbery

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780912946382
• eBook ISBN: 9781480459199
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

From one of our most important modern poets comes an essential early collection, including the famous long poems "The Skaters" and "Clepsydra"
When Rivers and Mountains was published in 1966, American poetry was in a state of radical redefinition, with John Ashbery recognized as one of the leading voices in the New York School of poets. Ashbery himself had just returned to America from ten years abroad working as an art critic in France, and Rivers and Mountains, his third published collection of poems, is now considered by many critics to represent a pivotal transition point in his artistic career. The poet who would gain widespread acclaim with his multiple-award-winning Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) is, in this collection, still very much engaged in the intimate, personal project of taking his poetry apart and putting it back together again, interrogating not just the act of writing but poetry itself—its purpose, its composition, its fundamental parts.
 
Nominated for a National Book Award by a panel of judges that included W. H. Auden and James Dickey, Rivers and Mountains includes two of Ashbery's most studied and admired works. "Clepsydra," which takes its name from an ancient device for measuring the passage of time, echoes both the physical form and the philosophical weight of a water clock in its contemplation of the experience of time as it passes. "The Skaters," the long poem that closes the collection, was immediately praised as a masterpiece of modern American poetry, and is the work that perhaps most clearly introduces the voice for which Ashbery is now well known and loved: generous, restless, wide-ranging, and human. 

The Skaters

I

These decibels

Are a kind of flagellation, an entity of sound

Into which being enters, and is apart.

Their colors on a warm February day

Make for masses of inertia, and hips

Prod out of the violet-seeming into a new kind

Of demand that stumps the absolute because not new

In the sense of the next one in an infinite series

But, as it were, pre-existing or pre-seeming in

Such a way as to contrast funnily with the unexpectedness

And somehow push us all into perdition.

Here a scarf flies, there an excited call is heard.

The answer is that it is novelty

That guides these swift blades o’er the ice

Projects into a finer expression (but at the expense

Of energy) the profile I cannot remember.

Colors slip away from and chide us. The human mind

Cannot retain anything except perhaps the dismal two-note theme

Of some sodden “dump” or lament.

But the water surface ripples, the whole light changes.

We children are ashamed of our bodies

But we laugh and, demanded, talk of sex again

And all is well. The waves of morning harshness

Float away like coal-gas into the sky.

But how much survives? How much of any one of us survives?

The articles we’d collect—stamps of the colonies

With greasy cancellation marks, mauve, magenta and chocolate,

Or funny-looking dogs we’d see in the street, or bright remarks.

One collects bullets. An Indianapolis, Indiana man collects slingshots of all epochs, and so on.

Subtracted from our collections, though, these go on a little while, collecting aimlessly. We still support them.

But so little energy they have! And up the swollen sands

Staggers the darkness fiend, with the storm fiend close behind him!

True, melodious tolling does go on in that awful pandemonium,

Certain resonances are not utterly displeasing to the terrified eardrum.

Some paroxysms are dinning of tambourine, others suggest piano room or organ loft

For the most dissonant night charms us, even after death. This, after all, may be happiness: tuba notes awash on the great flood, ruptures of xylophone, violins, limpets, grace-notes, the musical instrument called serpent, viola da gambas, aeolian harps, clavicles, pinball machines, electric drills, que sais-je encore!

The performance has rapidly reached your ear; silent and tear-stained, in the post-mortem shock, you stand listening, awash

With memories of hair in particular, part of the welling that is you,

The gurgling of harp, cymbal, glockenspiel, triangle, temple block, English horn and metronome! And still no presentiment, no feeling of pain before or after.

The passage sustains, does not give. And you have come far indeed.

Yet to go from “not interesting” to “old and uninteresting,”

To be surrounded by friends, though late in life,

To hear the wings of the spirit, though far. …

Why do I hurriedly undrown myself to cut you down?

“I am yesterday,” and my fault is eternal.

I do not expect constant attendance, knowing myself insufficient for your present demands

And I have a dim intuition that I am that other “I” with which we began.

My cheeks as blank walls to your tears and eagerness

Fondling that other, as though you had let him get away forever.

The evidence of the visual henceforth replaced

By the great shadow of trees falling over life.

A child’s devotion

To this normal, shapeless entity. …

Forgotten as the words fly briskly across, each time

Bringing down meaning as snow from a low sky, or rabbits flushed from a wood.

How strange that the narrow perspective lines

Always seem to meet, although parallel, and that an insane ghost could do this,

Could make the house seem so much farther in the distance, as

It seemed to the horse, dragging the sledge of a perspective line.

Dim banners in the distance, to die. … And nothing put to rights. The pigs in their cages

And so much snow, but it is to be littered with waste and ashes

So that cathedrals may grow. Out of this spring builds a tolerable

Affair of brushwood, the sea is felt behind oak wands, noiselessly pouring.

Spring with its promise of winter, and the black ivy once again

On the porch, its yellow perspective bands in place

And the horse nears them and weeps.

So much has passed through my mind this morning

That I can give you but a dim account of it:

It is already after lunch, the men are returning to their positions around the cement mixer

And I try to sort out what has happened to me. The bundle of Gerard’s letters,

And that awful bit of news buried on the back page of yesterday’s paper.

Then the news of you this morning, in the snow. Sometimes the interval

Of bad news is so brisk that … And the human brain, with its tray of images

Seems a sorcerer’s magic lantern, projecting black and orange cellophane shadows

On the distance of my hand … The very reaction’s puny,

And when we seek to move around, wondering what our position is now, what the arm of that chair.

A great wind lif...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Publisher’s Note
• These Lacustrine Cities
• Rivers and Mountains,
• Last Month
• Civilization and Its Discontents
• If the Birds Knew
• Into the Dusk-Charged Air
• The Ecclesiast
• The Recent Past
• The Thousand Islands
• A Blessing in Disguise
• Clepsydra
• The Skaters
• About the Author
• Copyright