BOOKS
A veil of haze protects this
Long-ago afternoon forgotten by everybody
In this photograph, most of them now
Sucked screaming through old age and death .
If one could seize America
Or at least a fine forgetfulness
That seeps into our outline
Defining our volumes with a stain
That is fleeting toO
But commemorates
Because it does define, after all:
Gray garlands, that threesome
Waiting for the light to change,
Air lifting the hair of one
Upside down in the reflecting pool.
479
What's Frostian here is the stay of both poem and photograph against the
confusion of time and death, a positive made from a negative, a diminished
thing turned to some account against Frost's background of "hugeness and
confusion shading away from where we stand into black and utter chaos."
Ashbery doesn't allow himself that diction, of course, because he's writing a
good while later, but his feeling for the' 'background" is much the same.
So too is his sense of the poem as a performance, except that he man–
ages his performances quite differently from Frost's. In "City Morning" we
follow the leisured, gentle, gently qualifying voice as it conducts us on a tour
of surprises, starting with our discovery that we are located "In this photo–
graph," an image both in and out of time. After the shock of "Sucked
screaming," muted because the action is past like the scene, a skein of syn–
tax begins to unwind, luring us into the apparent nonsense of the next seven
lines. These lines seem obscure because the syntax is convoluted, and the
curious use of language
("seize
America," "a fine forgetfulness," etc.)
momentarily distracts us from the whole. Sense seems
to
elude us as we focus
our moment to moment attention, but we never doubt there is a meaning
because we recognize the ligatures of meaning, the syntactic signposts. The
effect is like that of the opening lines of "Spring Day" from
The Double
Dream ofSpnng:
The immense hope, and forbearance
Trailing out of night, to sidewalks of the day
Like
air
breathed into a paper city, exhaled
As night returns bringing doubts
