This week’s Throwback Thursday selection is John Ashbery’s “White Roses” from The Tennis Court Oath (1977).

 

 

WHITE ROSES

The worst side of it all—
The white sunlight on the polished floor—
Pressed into service,
And then the window closed
And the night ends and begins again.
Her face goes green, her eyes are green;
In the dark corner playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”  I try
to describe for you,
But you will not listen, you are like the swan.

No stars are there,
No stripes,
But a blind man’s cane poking, however clumsily, into the inmost
corners of the house.
Nothing can be harmed !  Night and day are beginning again !
So put away the book,
The flowers you were keeping to give someone:
Only the white, tremendous foam of the street has any importance,
The new white flowers that are beginning to shoot up about now.

 

 

JOHN ASHBERY was born in Rochester, New York, in 1927. He is the author of more than twenty books of poetry, and has won nearly every major American award for poetry. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Ashbery is currently the Charles P. Stevenson, Jr., Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College. He divides his time between New York City and Hudson, New York.