Ashbery on the bridge
One of the sights I saw while in Minneapolis was a pedestrian bridge with a John Ashbery poem running all along its length in both directions. According to this article, the poem was commissioned expressly for the bridge. I didn’t know it was there until I spotted it while crossing the bridge itself, and even though I had a sense of its Ashbery-ness as I was reading, it was still pleasantly startling to see the name of my favorite living poet at the end of it. Then I walked slowly back over the roar of traffic on the highway below, transcribing the poem one line at a time. It goes like this (line breaks are my best guess, because they aren’t there in the original):
And now I cannot remember
How I would have had it.
It is not a conduit (confluence?)
But a place.
The place, of movement and an order.
The place of old order.
But the tail end of the movement is new,Driving us to say what we are thinking.
It is so much like a beach after all
Where you stand and think of going no further.And it is good when you get to no further.
It is like a reason that picks you up
And places you where you always wanted
To be.
This far.
It is fair to be crossing, to have crossed.
Then there is no promise in the other.
Here it is.
Steel and air, a mottled presence,
Small panacea and lucky for us.
And then it got very cool.
The line "It is fair to be crossing, to have crossed" marks the point where the two versions of the poem on opposite sides of the bridge, one going toward the Walker Sculpture Garden and the other toward Loring Park, cross in the middle. It’s also more or less the midpoint of the bridge over the highway. One could write an entire paper on the figure of chiasmus and the placement of that line.
When I headed back toward my hotel through Loring Park, already impressed at a city that would commission Ashbery to write something for a public place, I stumbled across a gazebo with excerpts of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets on little pedestals around it. I like Minneapolis. I hope I get a chance to go back and see what other poems might be hidden in its parks.
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