Deseret for John Ashbery
Out here someone else is thinking of you,
turning now towards you, to the west
and away. Your table has been set—and that’s scary, why not?
But the nominations have begun and soon you’ll substitute yourself
in doorways, and on stairs
when these hillsides burst in flames. It’s like
tearing the sky with your nipple and then walking back into the scene,
to the wound in the house, to the sink. Blue clouds
rush on through your skull, in the windows
of blood in your throat. Daylight throbs, just out of reach,
there at the lip of your stumps
while behind you, deep in the house, tools as solemn as kids
reassert themselves in the carpeted light
that sleeps beneath tables and chairs.
This house has been you all along
but soon it’s bedtime for vision and sound.
Still, as long as it’s there you will want it,
will want to be in it, to see it,
to touch the blue tub and have been.
And so, in the bath (where they’ll find you one day,
your own mouth stuffed with cool blood)
you pushed open the window and glazed off into space
filled up with blips and new lanes. The world that you see
is just so nearby; one is almost
always surrounded, so that it is almost perfectly safe
and you can open your eyes and still breathe.
Meanwhile, out here, we listen for your breath
like the bodies in songs where no one is home. It’s like
turning with your throat in that memory of the house
when already we’re inside touching the coats.
But this, you’ll never know, you say turning twice away
and then opening the car so the music all spilled out.
So that nothing, or the land, can whistle, or be said,
now the cars all went away in a blast of seeds and dust.
This excitement leads you again to the house
where you’ll find your own head, borrowed in glass,
neglected, transpired and waiting to act,
to greet you again with the holes of your face.
The light flecks on your eyes are like fingers on skin
tracing cloud shapes on backs, as they stretch out and pass.
Let this be our city, weaving the light, in the light,
on our backs, in beds, facing up.
-Anthony McCann from I am the dead, who, you take care of me (forthcoming in 2023 from Wave Books)
Anthony McCann is the author of five volumes of poetry including I am the dead, who, you take care of me and Thing Music. His non-fiction prose work, Shadowlands—on the 2016 armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge—was a finalist for the California Book Award and the Reading the West Award. Anthony is the current director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the California Institute of the Arts. He lives with this family in the Mojave Desert.
The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifty-Eight): Anthony McCann
Anthony McCann’s powerful “Deseret for John Ashbery” brings home the constant interaction between us, creatures of body, and our environs: cars, city, seeds, lights, glass, spilled music. “This house has been you all along,” the poem says, as part of its careful, scarifying trail of recognitions, the more real for their surreality.
The poem’s second-person address both underscores its urgency and sweeps us into its subject, identifying us with him. This is not like Auden saying of Yeats, “he became his admirers.” Ashbery has, in a sense, always been one with the reader. He did not imagine his thoughts and their movement as different from others’. Indeed, his work can be a seen as a rolling stream of thoughts with no specific owner, as language has no specific owner, the lack of such constituting its great beauty.
“Deseret,” conflation of “desert” and “desire,” is a Mormon term for “promised land.” Ashbery, no Mormon, was also no stranger to land with promises. He spoke of New York City as a ‘large empty space’ ideal for art. He also liked to attach beautiful, arcane words to places, as in his poem title, “These Lacustrine Cities.”
Ashbery grew up on fruitful land. Land with fruit trees. The cover of Karin Roffman’s brilliant biography of his early life, The Songs We Know Best, shows him among branches of a cherry tree, picking its fruit. The origins of the New York School of Poets were pastoral. Its poets came from elsewhere, with three of its big four harvested from Harvard. When they formed their friendships the United States was still in large part a country of small farms. The city still drew on the countryside for power and bounty.
As we know, depredations made against the natural world by large-scale commerce, including industrial farming and human-caused climate change, have drained beauty and usefulness from the nature we control. It is beyond Ironic that America began and grew through the expulsion of aboriginal inhabitants who knew how to prosper without disemboweling nature. Our question is now, as Robert Frost put it, “what to make of a diminished thing.”
Like all human environments, the poem is a constant interchange between the natural and the manufactured. As Ralph Waldo Emerson pointed out, the original of the umbrella is the tree. And what are houses but groves? The wood of them planed and calibrated, but still of the earth.
The poem begins by creating distance. It starts outside of Ashbery, imagining him imagined—as a kind of frontier? “Your table has been set” sounds Biblical and fatalistic, but is undercut by the folksiness of “and that’s scary—why not?” The business-as-usual tone of “But the nominations have begun” turns into a run of surreal transformations through which the poem’s Ashbery persists:
. . . and soon you’ll substitute yourself
in doorways, and on stairs
when these hillsides burst in flames. It’s like
tearing the sky with your nipple and then walking back into the scene,
to the wound in the house, to the sink. Blue clouds
rush on through your skull, in the windows
of blood in your throat. Daylight throbs, just out of reach,
there at the lip of your stumps
while behind you, deep in the house, tools as solemn as kids
reassert themselves in the carpeted light
that sleeps beneath tables and chairs.
This house has been you all along
but soon it’s bedtime for vision and sound.
“This house has been you all along” is signal. It diverges from Rainer Maria Rilke’s “He who has no house now will never have one.” Where we live is who we are, and our deaths do not change that. Our surround sees through us in our corporeality: “Blue clouds // rush on through your skull, in the windows / of blood in your throat.”
Every poem, I believe, balances clarity and mystery. Here the balance swings toward mystery. In a mysterious way, its emphasis on touch reassures and grounds.
Still, as long as it’s there you will want it,
will want to be in it, to see it,
to touch the blue tub and have been.
With “Meanwhile, out here, we listen for your breath / like the bodies in songs where no one is home,” a hungry collective enters the poem. How beautiful and ghostly, these lines.
The poem’s final exhortation, “Let this be our city,” begs franchise yet continues to a posture of—what? Capitulation? Acceptance? The poem ends with us “. . . weaving the light, in the light, / on our backs, in beds, facing up.” We are prostrate and open. So much feeling shimmers within the poem’s last three phrases and their brief syllables that pinion us to the house we have returned to, led by the “that memory of the house / when already we’re inside touching the coats.”
I have barely touched on the strange passion that “Ashbery,” “you,” and “we” undergo(es) in the poem. The effect it creates is highly personal, and the idea comes that perhaps our sense of the world has been dulled and distracted by impersonality, by abstraction and summary, ravenous forces that eat us out of house and home.
Anthony McCann’s ambitious, luminous poem, “Deseret for John Ashbery,” is both homage and home. It opens, harrows, and scatters our sense of belonging; and the humility it ends with feels like the beginning of wisdom. - Angela Ball
This is one of my favorite poems and it doesn't seem like Bukowski to me. Thanks.
Posted by: Noah Burke | November 06, 2008 at 04:04 PM
I agree - Bukowski usually isn't this hopeful. A lovely poem.
Posted by: Laura Orem | November 07, 2008 at 07:41 PM
One of my favorite poems. Very provocative and inspiring.
Posted by: www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000058706234 | September 19, 2009 at 02:09 PM
Love this poem, but you've got one of the lines wrong (every site I look at does, though). I have the original printing of this. The line "there is a light somewhere," should be "there is light somewhere."
Posted by: Tonymoore99 | October 08, 2012 at 09:25 AM
I have a friend who’s really good in writing a poem, too. She writes inspiring poem just like you and I admire you both.
Posted by: Ruggieri Sharkey | January 27, 2013 at 12:34 PM
Good poem. However, I would have cut the last three lines, making it a perfect poem.
Posted by: HDRBodegaPhoto | January 05, 2018 at 06:04 PM
Life is LIFE
Posted by: Obélix | June 19, 2019 at 07:38 PM
Said like a true alcoholic; I know, I am.
Posted by: Michael | October 21, 2019 at 03:33 AM
Light means hope, then we need to do meaningful things in our life, before death coming.
Posted by: Eric | April 14, 2020 at 09:06 PM
Always has a way of making the misery escapable as long as the mind and heart are set on the horizon of a fading light.
Posted by: Joaquin Nava | October 10, 2020 at 08:02 PM
I cant find this poem on https://bukowski.net/manuscripts/
Is this really Bukowski?
Posted by: The Wandering Earth | November 12, 2020 at 05:30 AM
When I first heard this recited, I thought it was one of the lectures by Joseph Campbell, whom I love. Was surprised it was Bukowski. The last three lines are absolutely the best. Without them, the poem would be just good. With them, it’s great! Here’s to the Old Gods!❤️
Posted by: Teuta Ilyriana | April 13, 2021 at 01:05 AM
The numb nut who said he would have cut the last 3 lines therefore making it a perfect poem... Well yes indeed I suppose it would be. You know the perfect poem. Poetry that is...Perfect. 99.9 percent of all poetry is written by people trying to write the perfect poem. And guess what? Most of them succeed at writing poetry, perfectly. And that's why hardly anyone will ever read it. Except maybe there mother , themselves and the person there sleeping with. Thank God for Bukowski. He wasn't aiming at perfection but as he said" getting down the word the line." Poetry books are sadly full of the perfect poem and or poems. That's why you can line your bird cage with most of it's pages.
Posted by: Steve Hammek | November 15, 2021 at 10:16 PM
Perhaps the most powerful words I've ever heard. Coming from Charles Bukowski, maybe the biggest nihilist to ever live. I am still in awe of its beauty.
P.S THE LAST THREE LINES ARE THE BEST PART OF THIS POEM
Posted by: Alex | March 16, 2022 at 06:27 PM
alchoholism is "dank"
Posted by: john smith | April 25, 2022 at 11:46 AM
I am in the camp that the last three lines are the best part of the poem. Why does this one person hate the last three lines? It is possible that they are just trolling, but I usually take people at face value so let's assume that they really do hate the last three lines. Why? My very first thought was that maybe they hate the idea of gods, but I don't think that is their problem since then they would just hate the last two lines. What the last three lines all have in common is an assurance that the reader is at a fundamental level very good and valuable. The person who complained may see this as unsupported hope. They may say that you can't just assert that a person is valuable. Why should we just say that a person is marvelous, maybe people are really all garbage. Why should we assume that the gods would ever delight in us, maybe they are completely disgusted by us. The debate is whether the gods fundamentally see humanity as worthy or worthless. The idea of the gods waiting is the much debated concept of free will. We have the innate capacity for being marvelous and delightful, but we must choose whether we are going to express that or not. But what if we don't know how to do that? If we sincerely look, we can find people who will teach us how to be marvelous and delightful.
Posted by: Westman Thalergard | July 06, 2022 at 10:07 AM
Parts of this poem were set to music and posted to Youtube. It's worth checking out (22 million views). This link really will take you to the song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhRXn2NRiWI
Posted by: Westman Thalergard | July 06, 2022 at 10:29 AM
Life has its ups &downs 4 sure.when da persona is in a rosy mood,da world seems 2 be his/her oyster,if in a lousy mood,demons seem 2 be swarming on da horizon.life has never been a bowl o strawberries w cream&sugar on top,not has death deprived da planet o a priceless jewel by taking us.live&let live.
Posted by: halfeyed bro | October 21, 2022 at 07:07 AM
My two cents ...
Whenever I read poetry, I view it two ways: 1) What the author intended; 2) What it means to me. Sometimes, they are in alignment. Sometimes, they aren't. Take T.S. Eliot's "Hollow Men". I view it differently than T.S. Eliot intended.
Here are how I take Bukowski's poem.
Every individual deserves his/her life. It's a gift. Live it as you will. However, we have built a society that demands that you conform. Some people struggle with that conformity more than others. Those that struggle, really..Really...REALLY struggle.
Bukowski is speaking to them. He's saying "Be you. You are marvelous." If you do choose to be you, the Gods will delight in you. In fact, they are waiting patiently so they can delight in you.
Again, this is how I read the poem. Right or wrong.
Posted by: Michael Felli | October 22, 2022 at 07:51 PM
The gods will delight but yoy will not be happy or successgul in the world's term,at least most. Don't tirn the Buk into new age pap.
Posted by: Chuck Taylor | May 31, 2023 at 08:18 AM
I think the chap that talked of cutting the last 3 lines.. you're all wondering why he hated those 3 lines. And maybe he did. But if you don't wonder about the 3 lines he asked to cut, and instead look at the line where the poem would have ended with said lines cut.. I think it would make more sense.
The poem begins with the line... Your life is your life. and if the last 3 were cut.. it would end with the line... Your life is your life.
Posted by: Zack | July 08, 2023 at 04:45 AM
Response to the consideration of the poem’s value with or without the last three lines:
One way I thought about it is this:
Without the last three lines, the tone of the message feels confrontational, empowering the reader to push back, to push against in order to pursue being true to one’s self.
And poetically/structurally, this provides no resolve.
Including the last three lines, the tone shifts to hopeful, and suggests an exchange of one kind of submission (against the expected cultural norms) for a different kind of submission (being delighted in)
And poetically/structurally, this provides a satisfying resolve
Either way, Bukowski invites the reader to personalize the message.
Posted by: Virginia | July 24, 2023 at 12:04 PM