Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner Page A

for the next show, which I thought was Campanadas a medianoche. I sat in the same seat, Teresa’s absence beside me. I took a yellow pill and waited; I was half an hour early. I drifted off, but was awakened by the movie’s opening strains: it was the second showing of Citizen Kane.
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    Isabel and I were smoking in bed in the early evening and she was reading Ana María Matute and I was reading Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata when I mentioned apropos of nothing that I would like to see Granada at some point and she said there was a night train that took about five hours so we packed what we could in the bags we always carried and walked to Atocha; I bought our tickets. We killed an hour drinking coffee in the atrium and then we boarded the archaic–looking Talgo train and found our seats and opened our respective books again, looking up at each other when with a jerk the train began to move.
    Excepting subways, a few commuter trains, and the miniature train in a Topeka park, I had never traveled by rail, as archaic a method of conveyance, I thought to myself, as poetry; a few minutes later I offered this thought to Isabel. She laughed and leaned over and kissed me and I wished that Teresa could see us, dark fields sliding by. Isabel removed the silver sticks from her hair and leaned her head against my shoulder and drifted off while I flipped through the Tolstoy for a half–remembered passage about a train, but couldn’t find it. It didn’t matter; every sentence, regardless of its subject, became mimetic of the action of the train, and the train mimetic of the sentence, and I felt suddenly coeval with its syntax. Because the sentences of Tolstoy, or rather Constance Garnett’s translations of Tolstoy, were in perfect harmony with the motion of the Talgo, real time and the time of prose began to merge, and reading, instead of removing me from the world, intensified my experience of the present.
    I put down the book and began to think: this strange experience of reading, the sense of harmony between the rhythms of a reproduction and the real, their structural identity, so that the subject of the sentence was precisely the time of its being furthered—this was what I valued in one of the only people I described as a “major poet” without irony, John Ashbery. I fished his Selected Poems from my bag, careful not to disturb Isabel, and opened it at random and read a little. Here also one could experience the texture of time as it passed, a shadow train, life’s white machine. Ashbery’s flowing sentences always felt as if they were making sense, but when you looked up from the page, it was impossible to say what sense had been made; while they used the language of logical connection—“but,” “therefore,” “so”—and the language that implied narrative development—“then,” “next,” “later”—such terms were merely propulsive; there was no actual organizing logic or progression. Reading an Ashbery sentence, an elaborate sentence stretched over many lines, one felt the arc and feel of thinking in the absence of thoughts. His pronouns—“it,” “you,” “we,” “I”—created a sense of intimacy, as though you were being addressed or doing the addressing or were familiar with the context the poem assumed, but you could never be sure of their antecedents, person or thing. The “it” in an Ashbery poem seemed ultimately to refer to the mysteries of the poem itself; in the absence of any stable external referent, the poem’s procedures invested its pronouns, and the “you” devolved upon the reader. I read:
     As long as it is there
You will desire it as its tag of wall sinks
Deeper as though hollowed by sunlight that
Just fits over it; it is both mirage and the little
That was present, the miserable totality
Mustered at any given moment, like your eyes
And all they speak of, such as your hands, in lost
Accents beyond any dream of ever wanting them again.
To