The Problem of Hope
in memory John Ashbery
1.
It stumps, the meagerness of hope,
which can never shout with
as full a throat as its opponents.
You discover you don’t want to hope,
and there’s absolutely no reason to.
All hope is latent,
the way all cats are opiated —
absurdly.
All hope is manic,
like a fastfood chain
trying desperately hard
to be good for you too.
Yet I believe
in the secret small work of hope.
2.
Who made hope forlorn anyway?
The nasty paradox of hope,
that it switches on just when, necessarily,
it can’t achieve its end.
If you ever were hopeful,
you’ll be hopeful again,
like the “lost” woman
who accidentally joined
the search party looking for her
and was, necessarily, found.
As a new apartment doesn’t feel like home
until you’ve been out all day
and come back at night,
hope settles in once you recognize
its current usefulness.
3.
Hope deferred
makes the heart sick,
but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.
4.
When I think of
the old masters, whose hopes,
like shingles on a house,
have slipped out of notch,
fifty times I hope
for every cent
they never spent.
5.
Years start dying
and the man with hair the color
of dandelion fuzz
prepares to conclude
his cave-like jest.
He predicted much,
deduced not at all.
Imagine you have hope—
why would you reject
the ideas he prodigally included?
He tenders social hope,
evocations of pleasure
and solitude and how steadily
we now and then believe.
Petals drop through the fog
with abandon.
Fifty times you hope:
may your troubles be appeased.
* * * * *
Stiff Neck
Left has nothing to teach me.
Right has nothing to show.
Why write a poem the public can’t use?
Why write one they can?
Here’s the window. It hurts to turn away.
Someone’s traced an ache in haze
and called it the moon.
* * * * *
A True Account of Talking with a Robin on the Mulch,
Near My Radius Ordained
What drama took place on the deck,
where I nursed a primitive state,
fear leading to anger!
With this, one July day
(my gray cat
sleeping beside me),
I avoided my poems
and the ways I could be of service.
The coming of fall,
the coming of fall —
I knew that my future was in loneliness,
in the hospital,
even in death.
Angst in the suburbs
is a despiséd thing.
I am a white middle-class woman
born in the 20thcentury,
enduring in the 21st,
who exists in herself,
answering her own ends,
who possesses
less than she wants
and more than she deserves.
On the deck I spoke out,
the words forced from me
by my ever-tyrannical
BIG FEELINGS,
“Why,” I asked “must it all
hasten so slowly?
Some story I tell,
with no pictures
and a bummer of an ending.”
I shouldn’t have expected an answer
but expectations linger,
just like memories.
No matter how much I had
that I didn’t deserve,
I wanted more, more,
more adjustments to the universe
so that some approving eye
always turned, cheerily, toward me.
With a torpor worthy of a brown bear,
I didn’t ask again,
but I couldn’t resist a final statement,
aloud, to the uncaring
suburban summer regalia:
“Here am I,” I whispered,
“oarless.”
“It’s a lovely confusion,
I have it myself,”
said a Robin, on the mulch,
full of wit and berries
(near my radius ordained).
Grateful for his attention
but unable to trust his wisdom,
I watched him, wary,
for a few minutes.
It was true. I observed
his utter whimsy and his
utter lack of conflict.
Trusting now, I began to speak
but before I could, he asked
“What are you working on?”
as if he were chatting at
a literary cocktail party!
“Frankly, Robin, I’m stymied.
A novel, an essay, a couple of poems…
all stopped dead.”
“Hell no!” he chirupped.
“You of all people know
that inspiration feels terrific
but isn’t a great stockpiler.
And besides,
your ear, what an ear!
The world needs that.
Put all your future in it
and you’ll have stars in your ink.”
This bird, this glider, this chirruper,
whose cheer up, cheerily
woke me most mornings,
was a true friend!
I tried to be a friend to him:
“What brilliance!
Brilliance and beauty!”
At that moment,
a Mockingbird began screaming
at my gray cat,
my duststorm on the deck.
The cat dozed and had no wish
to attack the Mockingbird,
yet every morning
this screamer tormented him.
I was reminded of my anger.
I was angry at the Mockingbird
(though I knew the cat and I
are both natural predators)
and I was angry at aggression
wherever it occurs, and it occurred
everywhere that July.
The Robin saw.
“Breathe, dear! To a mother,
for example, as you well remember,
a tricycle can be more sinister
than a panther. And a wing
would be more eloquent
than that infernal screaming
but the poor thing doesn’t know it.
Anger is only useful if it makes you fly.
You have to work to activate anger,”
he continued,
cocking a sterner eye,
“work so that it enlivens
rather than oppresses,
I mean,
but it’s light work, not heavy.”
I did breathe deeper then,
and I swear the cat relaxed too.
What a very small compass is salvation!
“Thank you, Robin!”
“It’s time for me to go now,”
the Robin asserted melodiously.
“I have my impulses to follow!
Well, that, and I must feed myself.
See that you do it too.”
“Do which too?
Follow my impulses or …?”
But I knew that the only answer,
ever, is Both,
and he knew I knew.
Reluctant to let him go
I said, at the risk of seeming ungrateful,
“Robin, talking with you
has been a marvelous refreshment,
it reminds me of …”
“Vladimir and Frank, I know.
Well?” “Well, I’m just saying …
They had the Sun to talk to
and I have you.
And I wouldn’t trade,
believe me,
but the Sun is large, universal, fiery,
and full of majestic eruptions.
While you’re small, suburban,
intermittent,
and you modestly conceal
your fiery breast
under gray wings. Tell me,
is it because I’m a woman?”
“I don’t profess,” he replied,
“to understand the ways of the muse.
Certainly women’s work of all kinds
is shamefully undervalued.
But consider,
the Sun and I,
we each wake sleepers.
Some wake to light,
some to song.
Both seem equally charming
from my perspective,
and I don’t consider myself lesser.
I wake to light,
then I carry that light
through my song
to those still dreaming.
You’re still dreaming.”
With that, he flew,
the Mockingbird bowed
on his teetering branch,
and the day, the real day,
began.