Musica Reservata by John Ashbery

Musica Reservata

Then I reached the field and I thought 

this is not a joke not a book 

but a poem about something—but what? 

Poems are such odd little jiggers. 

This one scratches himself, gets up, then goes off to pee 

in a corner of the room. Later looking quite 

stylish in white jodhpurs against the winter 

snow, and in his reluctance to talk to the utterly 

discursive: “I will belove less than feared ...”

He trotted up, he trotted down, he trotted all around the town. 

Were his relatives jealous of him? 

Still the tock-tock machinery lies half-embedded in sand. 

Someone comes to the window, the wave is a gesture proving nothing, 

and nothing has receded. One gets caught 

in servants like these and must lose the green leaves, 

one by one, as an orchard is pilfered, and then, with luck, 

nuggets do shine, the baited trap slides open. 

We are here with our welfare intact.

Oh but another time, on the resistant edge of night 

one thinks of the pranks things are. 

What led the road that sped underfoot 

to oases of disaster, or at least the unknown? 

We are born, buried for a while, then spring up just as 

everything is closing. Our desires are extremely simple: 

a glass of purple milk, for example, or a dream 

of being in a restaurant. Waiters encourage us, and squirrels. 

There’s no telling how much of us will get used.

My friend devises the cabbage horoscope 

that points daily to sufficiency. He and all those others go home. 

The walls of this room are like Mykonos, and sure enough, 

green plumes toss in the breeze outside 

that underscores the stillness of this place 

we never quite have, or want. Yet it’s wonderful, this 

being; to point to a tree and say don’t I know you from somewhere? 

Sure, now I remember, it was in some landscape somewhere, 

and we can all take off our hats.

At night when it’s too cold 

what does the rodent say to the glass shard? 

What are any of us doing up? Oh but there’s 

a party, but it too was a dream. A group of boys 

was singing my poetry, the music was an anonymous 

fifteenth-century Burgundian anthem, it went something like this:

“This is not what you should hear, 

but we are awake, and days 

with donkey ears and packs negotiate 

the narrow canyon trail that is 

as white and silent as a dream, 

that is, something you dreamed. 

And resources slip away, or are pinned 

under a ladder too heavy to lift. 

Which is why you are here, but the mnemonics 

of the ride are stirring.”

That, at least, is my hope.