Street Musicians

By John Ashbery b. 1927 John Ashbery

One died, and the soul was wrenched out

Of the other in life, who, walking the streets

Wrapped in an identity like a coat, sees on and on

The same corners, volumetrics, shadows

Under trees. Farther than anyone was ever

Called, through increasingly suburban airs

And ways, with autumn falling over everything:

The plush leaves the chattels in barrels

Of an obscure family being evicted

Into the way it was, and is. The other beached

Glimpses of what the other was up to:

Revelations at last. So they grew to hate and forget each other.

So I cradle this average violin that knows

Only forgotten showtunes, but argues

The possibility of free declamation anchored

To a dull refrain, the year turning over on itself

In November, with the spaces among the days

More literal, the meat more visible on the bone.

Our question of a place of origin hangs

Like smoke: how we picnicked in pine forests,

In coves with the water always seeping up, and left

Our trash, sperm and excrement everywhere, smeared

On the landscape, to make of us what we could.

Source: Houseboat Days (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1977)

Biography

John Ashbery is recognized as one of the greatest twentieth-century American poets. He has won nearly every major American award for poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Yale Younger Poets Prize, the Bollingen Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Griffin International Award, and a MacArthur “Genius” Grant. Ashbery's poetry challenges its readers to discard all presumptions about the aims, themes, . . .

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