Syringa by John Ashbery

Syringa

 

Orpheus liked the glad personal quality

Of the things beneath the sky. Of course, Eurydice was a part   

Of this. Then one day, everything changed. He rends   

Rocks into fissures with lament. Gullies, hummocks   

Can’t withstand it. The sky shudders from one horizon   

To the other, almost ready to give up wholeness.   

Then Apollo quietly told him: “Leave it all on earth.   

Your lute, what point? Why pick at a dull pavan few care to   

Follow, except a few birds of dusty feather,

Not vivid performances of the past.” But why not?   

All other things must change too.

The seasons are no longer what they once were,   

But it is the nature of things to be seen only once,

As they happen along, bumping into other things, getting along   

Somehow. That’s where Orpheus made his mistake.   

Of course Eurydice vanished into the shade;

She would have even if he hadn’t turned around.

No use standing there like a gray stone toga as the whole wheel   

Of recorded history flashes past, struck dumb, unable to utter an intelligent

Comment on the most thought-provoking element in its train.   

Only love stays on the brain, and something these people,   

These other ones, call life. Singing accurately

So that the notes mount straight up out of the well of   

Dim noon and rival the tiny, sparkling yellow flowers   

Growing around the brink of the quarry, encapsulates   

The different weights of the things.

                                                       But it isn’t enough   

To just go on singing. Orpheus realized this

And didn’t mind so much about his reward being in heaven   

After the Bacchantes had torn him apart, driven   

Half out of their minds by his music, what it was doing to them.

Some say it was for his treatment of Eurydice.

But probably the music had more to do with it, and   

The way music passes, emblematic

Of life and how you cannot isolate a note of it

And say it is good or bad. You must

Wait till it’s over. “The end crowns all,”

Meaning also that the “tableau”

Is wrong. For although memories, of a season, for example,   

Melt into a single snapshot, one cannot guard, treasure   

That stalled moment. It too is flowing, fleeting;   

It is a picture of flowing, scenery, though living, mortal,   

Over which an abstract action is laid out in blunt,   

Harsh strokes. And to ask more than this

Is to become the tossing reeds of that slow,

Powerful stream, the trailing grasses

Playfully tugged at, but to participate in the action   

No more than this. Then in the lowering gentian sky   

Electric twitches are faintly apparent first, then burst forth   

Into a shower of fixed, cream-colored flares. The horses   

Have each seen a share of the truth, though each thinks,   

“I’m a maverick. Nothing of this is happening to me,   

Though I can understand the language of birds, and   

The itinerary of the lights caught in the storm is fully apparent to me.

Their jousting ends in music much

As trees move more easily in the wind after a summer storm   

And is happening in lacy shadows of shore-trees, now, day after day.”

 

But how late to be regretting all this, even

Bearing in mind that regrets are always late, too late!   

To which Orpheus, a bluish cloud with white contours,   

Replies that these are of course not regrets at all,   

Merely a careful, scholarly setting down of

Unquestioned facts, a record of pebbles along the way.

And no matter how all this disappeared,   

Or got where it was going, it is no longer   

Material for a poem. Its subject

Matters too much, and not enough, standing there helplessly   

While the poem streaked by, its tail afire, a bad   

Comet screaming hate and disaster, but so turned inward   

That the meaning, good or other, can never   

Become known. The singer thinks

Constructively, builds up his chant in progressive stages   

Like a skyscraper, but at the last minute turns away.   

The song is engulfed in an instant in blackness   

Which must in turn flood the whole continent   

With blackness, for it cannot see. The singer   

Must then pass out of sight, not even relieved   

Of the evil burthen of the words. Stellification   

Is for the few, and comes about much later   

When all record of these people and their lives   

Has disappeared into libraries, onto microfilm.   

A few are still interested in them. “But what about   

So-and-so?” is still asked on occasion. But they lie   

Frozen and out of touch until an arbitrary chorus

Speaks of a totally different incident with a similar name   

In whose tale are hidden syllables

 

 

Of what happened so long before that

In some small town, one indifferent summer.