It Must Be Sophisticated By John Ashbery

It Must Be Sophisticated John Ashbery CONJUNCTIONS:19 Fall 1992

There are attics in old houses where doubt lingers as to the corrosive effect of night-blindness: namely are its victims directly linkable to a chain of events happening elsewhere? If so, we should shrug off resemblances to our line of work. What was said around the house had undue influence on one of several shapely witnesses. And, as dames do, she started talking to any and every interlocutor out of harm's way. One day you wake up and they've skipped. Or was it always empty like this? It's hard to remember a time when it wasn't. Maybe your memory's playing tricks on you? Maybe there never was such a person as Lisa Martins? Maybe it's all over when you stand up to walk the last mile in Enna Jettick shoes, and they draw the blind quickly to forget you. Once forgotten you're as good as dead, anyway. And who would help you now? You might as well be trapped at the bottom of a well in the Sahara. They don't know you're alive, or that your life was anything but exemplary when it came time for you to live. The fashionable present keeps queening it over the slightly dishonorable past. Your bridesmaids are scattered on the wind. You don't feel like having lunch. Maybe a walk, and a cup of tea later? We'll see you at the end of the month! they cried. Now it keeps ticking, there must be a mystery down there, darn it. I'll find it if it takes all night and then some other sleuth can solve it. I was only hired as a go-between. My tour is ended, and if I've a piece of advice for you, it's check out the rafters, the moldings. You can't tell who might have bargained for clemency in your absence, leaving you holding the bag when you got back, restless, ready to start school, but the vagrant air's black, what with the negative promise of spring. The boys are still rehearsing their parts they haven't been over, and really it's none of my business. Said the table to the chair. I was confined here. That's all I know, truthfully. During the amnesty I walked out through the open gate. The streets were full of people, running back and forth, talking disjointedly. I was supposed to be somewhere else, but no one knew it. In the confusion I returned home. Now the newshounds pester us daily. What was I born for? More experiments? Why are they fighting over a fuse? It doesn't seem to be harmless like those people are listening to over there; at the same time, everyone's a suspect in the new climate and country. The wind turns a page of the old tome, then another and another; soon it's riffling through them too fast to stop. There's nothing in it anyway. Time to move on to another frontier beyond the transparent frieze of foliage, guns, barges, to where he began. Sure, dem days is gone forever, but it's the attention span that's really gone. Back when they'd send for you once they got a house built, it was clever to hedge your bets and produce a fraternal twin made of bedclothes with a mop for a wig while you scaled the wall on a rope ladder to be the next new thing that thinks and cautions others not to. Far from the inner city cry of conflicting attitudes, one fled with one's holy illusions intact, one's misconceptions too, until the whole mindset took on a largely symbolic look, an indifferent jewel, toy of the weather, of successive washes of light, I can hardly believe I'm here in this tiny republic carved out of several conflicting principalities. It's enough, perhaps, that I was questioned at the edge of my performance. That now I'm safe from my own sang-froid and scores of others, that mere forgetfulness can save up to fifty-three lives, that they can share your power and go on glancing upward. Because after all we were the three original ones, the president, vice-president and treasurer of our class. And were formed to repay what obscure debt and be summarily taken out of school and handed over to our parents. It's what matters then, and after. No one says you have to live up to principles; indeed, what are they? What difference does it make which one came too close in the richly darkened theater, if all they were after was to coax you into the light, watch you blink a minute, and then pass on, they too, to the larger arenas, each in the wind, in the sand, the reeds, growing? Because even if it doesn't punish you exactly, the thing has been lived through, the experience sealed. O what book shall I read now? for they are all of them new, and used, when I write my name on the flyleaf. Look, here is another one unread, not written. Time for you to choose. http://www.conjunctions.com/archives/c19-ja.htm