"Voyage in the Blue" Engagement #2
October 03, 2022
For where a mirage has once been, life must be. (10)
Things are unlocking. The poem is becoming tactile. I have developed a sense of its geography. There are three figures in a little boat on a river (65). The current is slow. I am one of the figures, perhaps a ghostly fourth. “You and I and the dog” (36) prompts me toward the latter. I am the you or the I. Ashbery doesn’t seem to be the I, not this time through. He is one of the ghosts who haunts the river (if he is a present figure at all, spectral or otherwise), one of many. Time is heavy and fluid here. Time is the poem and also nothing (forgive me, I’m wearing a collared shirt today and feel some ridiculous and obtuse verve is licensed): the dog and the other figure and I are here, “this is what matters for now” (37). A pinpoint. The poem collapses on this singular, simple moment and I must halt. It is not fleeting if I don’t want it to be. The current can let up and the boat will stop. But Voyage also augurs the expanse of time. The river is infinite. On its banks: the ruins of countless mythologies.
For where a mirage has once been, life must be.
The river banks and the dense forests beyond our understanding teem with voices, those of mind-readers, sailors, rooks––people who “cover us, they are older / And have lived before. They want no part of us, / Only to be dying, and over with it” (51-53). On this voyage (clever, every reading is a voyage) I am afraid of them. I sense agony and loss. Or indifference? For there is a serenity to the river and its banks, the forest, even the looming shadow castle. I don’t want to leave the little boat or my companions.
The river as time itself is an obvious identification. I don’t know if it’ll maintain the import I’ve lavished upon it this go around (if I can call it a go around. Voyage does not suggest a cycle. Unless…). I’ve also demonstrated my own narcissism by inserting myself so violently into the poem’s central vessel. Of course I am on the little boat. I am one of the three figures. I must be! Me! Where before I was one deviation removed from the main action (to the extent that there is any), merely a conduit of the language, an admirer, now I fancy myself an active participant. And not just active, I am the main action’s fulcrum. I don’t know how that escalation occurred in such short order. Am I that hungry to be perceived? Who am I to seek anything from Ashbery? But I cannot apologize for being transported! This reading was a sensory experience. I was on the boat, and I could look around…
Will this kind of activation recur?