What Is Found There

Ask a hog what is happening. Go on. Ask him.
The road just seems to vanish
And not that far in the distance, either. The horizon must have been
   moved up.
So it is that by limping carefully
From one day to the next, one approaches a worn, round stone
Crouching low in the hollow of a gully
With no door or window but a lot of old license plates
Tacked up over a slit too narrow for a wrist to pass through
And a sign: “Van Camp’s Pork and Beans.”
From then on in: angst-colored skies, emotional withdrawals
As the whole business starts to frighten even you,
Its originator and promoter. The horizon returns
As a smile of recognition this time, polite, unquestioning.
How long ago high school graduation seems
Yet it cannot have been so very long:
One has traveled such a short distance.
The styles haven’t changed much,
And I still have a sweater and one or two other things I had then.
It seems only yesterday that we saw
The movie with the cows in it
And turned to one at your side, who burped
As morning saw a new garnet-and-pea-green order propose
Itself out of the endless bathos, like science-fiction lumps.
Impossible not to be moved by the tiny number
Those people wore, indicating they should be raised to this or
  that power.
But now we are at Cape Fear and the overland trail
Is impassable, and a dense curtain of mist hangs over the sea.

Selected Poems, 1985, pp. 178-79

John Ashbery

Far from the Rappahannock, the silent
Danube moves along toward the sea.
The brown and green Nile rolls slowly
Like the Niagara’s welling descent.
Tractors stood on the green banks of the Loire
Near where it joined the Cher.
The St. Lawrence prods among black stones
And mud. But the Arno is all stones.
Wind ruffles the Hudson’s
Surface. The Irawaddy is overflowing.
But the yellowish, gray Tiber
Is contained within steep banks. The Isar
Flows too fast to swim in, the Jordan’s water
Courses over the flat land. The Allegheny and its boats
Were dark blue. The Moskowa is
Gray boats. The Amstel flows slowly.
Leaves fall into the Connecticut as it passes
Underneath. The Liffey is full of sewage,
Like the Seine, but unlike
The brownish-yellow Dordogne.
Mountains hem in the Colorado
And the Oder is very deep, almost
As deep as the Congo is wide.
The plain banks of the Neva are
Gray. The dark Saône flows silently.
And the Volga is long and wide
As it flows across the brownish land. The Ebro
Is blue, and slow. The Shannon flows
Swiftly between its banks. The Mississippi

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John Ashbery