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‘a serpentine | Gesture’: The Synthetic Reconstruction

of Ashbery’s Poetic Voice
By David Dick

In 1966, John Ashbery published Rivers and Mountains. The departure from the fractures of The
Tennis Court Oath (1962) are immediately apparent: it is a return to a language still distinctly
marked by Ashbery’s usual probing and misdirection, but without the direct dislocations
committed to denotative meaning, form and syntax in the earlier book. Indeed, much of what would
become Ashbery’s characteristic fluid, evasive and evolving later style(s), can be found in Rivers
and Mountains. And though its final epic poem, ‘The Skaters,’ holds a central place in the canon of
Ashbery’s poetry, and more pointedly his long poems, the speculative and living voice of his poetry
can be seen to have to been launched into its perpetual shapeshifting in the marvellous penultimate
poem of Rivers and Mountains, ‘Clepsydra.’

A ‘clepsydra’ is an ancient device that measures time by the regulated passing of water (or
mercury) through a small aperture. Considering Ashbery’s vague, but pointed, statement about
‘Clepsydra,’ being ‘a meditation on how time feels as it is passing’ (Kostelanetz 101), it is an
appropriate object for the work to be named after. One of the last poems Ashbery wrote while he
was living in France (Gilson 502), he has said in interview with Richard Kostelanetz that he is
particularly close to ‘Clepsydra,’ feeling in it a poetic unity that he hadn’t experienced before,1
noting in the same interview:

After my analytic period, I wanted to get into a synthetic period. I wanted to write a new kind of
poetry after my dismembering of language. Wouldn’t it be nice, I said to myself, to do a long poem
that would be a long extended argument, but would have the beauty of a single word? (101)

Of course, considering this is the poem that he believed moved him on from his ‘analytic’ to his
‘synthetic’ phase – terminology rooted in Cubist art criticism and history, which traces phases of
artistic development analogously similar to Ashbery’s own early development as a poet – it makes
sense to think of ‘Clepsydra,’ alongside ‘The Skaters,’ as the poem which illustrates the
reconstruction of his poetic voice after its dispersal in The Tennis Court Oath. As Ashbery writes in
‘Clepsydra’:

We hear so much

Of its further action that at last it seems that

It is we, our taking it into account rather, that are

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The reply that prompted the question, and

That the latter, like a person waking on a pillow

Has the sensation of having dreamt the whole thing,

Of returning to participate in that dream, until

The last word is exhausted

(Collected 141)

One of the defining features of ‘Clepsydra’ is how it operates on various reversals of expectation and
a persistent self-cancellation, darting from ‘Untruth to willed moment, scarcely called into being’
(Collected 140). In this sense, it truly is ‘The reply that prompted the question.’ John Shoptaw
perceives this to be an essential drive in the poem: ‘that unforeseeable ends are somehow written
into forgotten beginnings’ (89). The poem maintains its development on the back of this
indeterminacy, digging so deep into itself in search of an answer – which will provoke another
query – that the ‘sensation’ becomes one of a ‘dream.’ It is a ‘dream’ that will only disperse, maybe
concretise into something more readily familiar, when ‘the last word is exhausted,’ which, as
‘Clepsydra’ unfolds, seems impossible. Notwithstanding the best destructive efforts of the irrational
subconscious, there will always be another word, another meaning, especially as these things come
into synthetic relation with other things. The intuition of the speaker, then, is clearly favoured in
the near automatic, but ultimately controlled, musing of the poem. If The Tennis Court Oath aimed
to ‘exhaust’ Ashbery’s ‘words,’ it was ‘Clepsydra’ that ‘anchor(ed) this new way of writing’ (Kelley).
It is the ‘reply’ he purposefully sought in asking questions of his poetry that effectively opened it to
new questions and explorations.

As such, ‘Clepsydra’ is important for laying the groundwork for later works, like the perpetual
argument, sentences and motions of Three Poems, the evasive sense of a just out-of-grasp meaning
in ‘Litany,’ and the long lines of poems like ‘A Wave’ and Flow Chart. Nonetheless, it still looks back
to The Tennis Court Oath in the indeterminacy of its grammar and syntax – it is still of Ashbery’s
self-proposed ‘French’ period (Kelley) – albeit in a manner no longer at the service of exposing the
fractured nature of the poem’s objects, so much as creating a continual, sinuous, shifting and
prosodically elegant link between them. ‘Clepsydra’ is hinged on a concessional language that lends
it a sense of constant and correcting momentum, its words encountering and portraying a sense of
time as an unresolved, contradictory and unexplainable entity. Nothing in the poem is fully present,
except for the text itself, and thus it is in need of the reader to directly engage it in an, often
troubling, attempt to bring it to presence; not necessarily to ‘make sense of it,’ but to understand
the kind of aesthetic sensation of ‘time’ that Ashbery is endeavouring to provoke. In essence, they
are responsible for bringing the poem to ‘life’ – ‘this crumb of life I also owe to you’ (Collected 145)
echoing the apparent appeal to multiple readers (or lovers, though for a poet what is the
difference?) in ‘A Blessing in Disguise’: ‘I prefer ‘you’ in the plural, I want ‘you,’ | You must come to
me’ (Collected 139). This appeal toward, and acknowledgement of, his readers is vital for Ashbery’s
future poetics, particularly in the sense that he still refuses to grant them anything particularly
easy. In fact, the work’s difficulty is its invitation.
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This sensation is comparable to the ‘unanalyzable transcendental claim’ proposed by Kenneth

Rexroth in his essay, ‘The Cubist Poetry of Pierre Reverdy’ (1969),2 where the reader is lured into
the world of the poem to recognise it not as something ‘other,’ but as an additive to the world
already known. Or, correlatively, in Maurice Blanchot’s discussion of Surrealism:

Surrealists understand, moreover, that language is not an inert thing: it has a life of
its own, and a latent power that escapes us. Alain wrote that one must always verify
where ideas are – they do not stay in their place, that is why they cannot be on their
guard. It is the same for words: they move, they have their demand, they dominate
us. That is in part what Brice Parain called the transcendence of language
(‘Reflections on Surrealism’ 88-89).

‘Clepsydra,’ then, through the slippery vagaries of how its language freely develops into a poem,
plays insistently on notions of presence and absence, seeing them not necessarily as opposites, but
as active and parallel corollaries in pursuit of an idea of existence and selfhood – ‘light sinks into
itself, becomes dark and heavy’ (Collected 144). It opens with a seeming promise of illumination,
but is always circling back to contrast this with darkness, noting near its conclusion that ‘because
everything is relative’ in the poem – opened to a kind of Cubist simultaneity – it is impossible to
grasp any ‘more than groping shadows of an incomplete | Former existence’ (Collected 146). Ben
Lerner argues that Ashbery uses ‘time’ to pin the reader ‘to the moment of reading,’ effectively
frustrating ‘retrograde interpretive strategies that would stop the flow of language at its source’
(203): its ‘incomplete | Former existence.’ This is a particularly apt way of looking at ‘Clepsydra.’
The poem is present in ‘the moment of reading,’ but is guided by a speaker who nonetheless
attempts to lead its busy language to absent itself from the breadth of its connotations as it emerges
on the page, is consumed, then dispelled in this moment. The extensions of the lines in ‘Clepsydra,’
and the hint of it arriving at a point that is always skipping away, establish a sense of time as the
simultaneous creation and fulfilment of the work by writer and reader – the moment of reception in
the ‘shadow of | Your single and twin existence’ (Collected 146). Its words are always moving,
creating a patchwork of themes and images that read back and forth, with no firm indication of
their import or even beginning; of where retroactive reading should occur; of where the self can
actually reside. To read ‘Clepsydra’ is to experience ‘time passing’ in the sublimations of its voice
wrestling with the inevitable grinding forward of time itself, as the voice or poem attempts to know
itself in a present that is always threatened by the presence of the past.

The ‘long extended argument’ based around the significance of a ‘single word’ that Ashbery claimed
was the aim of the poem, which it indeed pivots on, is an argument between the resistant, half-
formed consciousness evident in ‘Clepsydra’ and the presence of time which insists on this
consciousness’ continual renewal to arrive at individuality: the self. Although this self exists in the
present, it cannot know itself in the present, only retrospectively in the moment just passed:

Each moment seemed to bore back into the centuries

For profit and manners, and an old way of looking that

Continually shaped those lips into a smile.

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(Collected 143)

Time, as he notes in the later poem, ‘Soonest Mended’ from The Double Dream of Spring, ‘is an
emulsion’ (Collected 186): it is suspended in itself. The argument, then, is about the significance of
past and present time, which ultimately cannot be rent apart. ‘Clepsydra’ is not even broken down
into stanzas to perhaps lend some respite to the harried speaker, who pursues and evaluates point
after point to only watch them shift away as the sentence or line extends and moves on. The voice of
the poem, often adopting an almost legal or even academic rhetoric amid its flights of emphatic
lyricism, attempts to bring together these disparate parts to form a whole, but finds itself thwarted
by the onward and circular momentum of ‘Clepsydra’ – the never still and self-negating language
enacting the sensation of a nonlinear time the self has little chance of reconciling, controlling or
understanding. The argument and poem are lost to the presumably ‘white noise’ of a ‘recurring
whiteness’ (Collected 140), leading to a ‘white din’:

But the argument,

That is its way, has already left these behind: it

Is, it would have you believe, the white din up ahead

That matters: unformed yells, rocketings,

Affected turns, and tones of voice called

By upper shadows toward some cloud of belief

Or its unstated circumference.

(Collected 140-41)

Whereas in Three Poems, Ashbery places his speaker in a state of Bergsonian ‘duration’ – even
parodies it, or the Modernists’ appropriation of it, in the poems’ grandiose, seemingly infinite, never
resolved extensions that similarly demand ‘wholeness’ – in ‘Clepsydra’ the sense of the eternity of
the moment is muted, building via colons to an ‘unstated circumference,’ to examine instead how
the self only really has the sensation of the passage of time, swirling around, de- and re-
constructing the individual moment-by-moment in the midst of the ‘unformed,’ ‘affected,’ and
disruptively blank ‘white din.’

As Ben Hickman writes, the poem is concerned with ‘becoming complicated’: ‘that is, both how
things become complicated, and how becoming itself is a complicated matter’ (35). What it
attempts, then, is to ‘represent … the movement and essential ungroundedness of moments of
thought’ (37). The opening of ‘Clepsydra’ presents this indeterminacy, dropping the reader and
speaker into a question only seemingly half-asked, as if it is ‘thought’ emerging without any clear
notion of its beginning. Or as John Koethe writes: it is ‘a question in search of a subject.’ The
question mark seems to indicate the following sentence is the question’s answer, even if, without
the grammatical sign, it can be seen to syntactically follow the question – the question mark can
feasibly be moved to be after either ‘dropped’ or ‘go’:
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Hasn’t the sky? Returned from moving the other

Authority recently dropped, wrested as much of

That severe sunshine as you need now on the way

You go.

‘Clepsydra’ appears to use the ‘sky’ and ‘air’ to establish a sense of the poem’s desire for ambiguity
and openness – the transparent spaces around its language, which even attempts to invade the
language. Here, though, the speaker seems to be asking if they have done enough, if they have
adequately performed their role. Has ‘the sky’ not given ‘you’ enough ‘sunshine’ to, suggestively,
light up the ‘way | You go’? Will the poem be bathed in this early light to achieve some clarity?
Evidently not, as it quickly goes on, and the reader is left to wonder what the ‘other | Authority’ is?
Moreover, who is the second person in reference to? Who exactly is, or are, the ‘other | Authority’?
The ambiguity of these four lines indicate the way in which ‘Clepsydra’ will unfold from this
strange, but contextually apt, half-asked question: there is always doubt and evaporation, never a
sense of being fully present: it’s all ‘half-meant, half-perceived’ (Collected 140).

‘Clepsydra’ seems to refer to itself materially, rendered through the inexactness of its language:

when the landscape all around

Is hilly sites that will have to be reckoned

Into the total for there to be more air: that is,

More fitness read into the undeduced result, than land.

This means never getting any closer to the basic

Principle operating behind it than to the distracted

Entity of a mirage.

(Collected 140)

The ‘hilly sites’ are nebulous and need to be ‘reckoned | Into the total’: made whole to establish
some kind of presence in the poem, even as the speaker cannot get ‘any closer’ to the ‘Principle
operating behind’ them, despite the argumentative, academic language in use – ‘that is,’ ‘undeduced
result.’ These ‘sites’ only serve to produce ‘more air,’ and, perhaps, breathe more life – ‘fitness’ –
into the poem. Yet, the ‘sites’ can only be understood as a ‘mirage’: something falsely present,
absent in any space other than the observer’s mind – ‘an empty yet personal | Landscape’ (Collected
142). Appropriately, ‘Clepsydra’ is noticeably enclosed in its own language and the fancies of its
development projected through the unsure consciousness of its speaker. In this awkwardly self-
aware sense, the poem appears to be constantly calling itself to question – finding a seeming
solidity to only phase it into transparency, transforming social practice into private introspection –
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I see myself in this totality, and meanwhile

I am only a transparent diagram, of manners and

Private words with the certainty of being about to fall.

(Collected 145)

Without the sense of place – the nebulous ‘hilly sites’ – ‘Clepsydra’ finds its internal reality less in
the utilisation and defamiliarisation of external objects, and more in the fluctuating uncertainties of
its speaker attempting to control, or even un-control, the poem’s slippery meaning. Like ‘The
Skaters,’ which can be read as one of Ashbery’s great ars poetica statements – and, indeed,
considering its writing predated ‘Clepsydra,’ can also be seen to have laid the poetic groundwork
for the latter poem to traverse – the voice of ‘Clepsydra’ is intently focused on the poem’s
production, largely because this production gives it ‘being.’ The hesitations and flinching, evasive
(un)certainties of the poem, then, enact the attempt by the speaker to locate themselves in the
disparate parts of the stream-of-consciousness the poem occasionally seems to allude to and exist
within – the impossible ‘totality’ of a moment. It cannot rest, for it needs to refuse such stability to
ascertain a greater, albeit ‘mirage’ driven, ‘totality’: a shimmering wholeness that will emerge, and
then shift on, as the world itself will never be entirely still.

As Ashbery aims to give a sensation of passing time and the self’s malleable place within this flow,
‘Clepsydra’ posits its arguments in terms of ‘moments’ – ‘Each moment seemed to bore back into
the centuries | For profits and manners’ (Collected 143). It exists in the spaces and intensities of
these moments’ unresolvable, seemingly contradictory tensions. The speaker lays claim to the
immediacy of the poem’s presentation, exposing the dual presence of the writer and reader as the
activating ingredient to give some semblance of sense to the work’s language, even though in
breaking into such moments it refuses a linear connection that may grant it totalised meaning. In
one of the most important, and prosodically supple, passages in the poem, Ashbery self-consciously
reveals the very mechanics of ‘Clepsydra,’ its harsh swerve away from a stable, analytical frame-of-
mind, to favour instead an organic poetic growth, while opening the poem’s meaning, problematic
unity, even reality, to the subjectivity of the intuition letting the work sedately fly by:

Each moment

Of utterance is the true one; likewise none are true,

Only is the bounding from air to air, a serpentine

Gesture which hides the truth behind a congruent

Message, the way air hides the sky, is, in fact,

Tearing it limb from limb this very moment: but

The sky has pleaded already and this is about

As graceful a kind of non-absence as either

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Has a right to expect

(Collected 140)

This very immediacy, presence through ‘non-absence,’ explains, at least partly, why Ashbery’s
experimental early poetry mostly avoids any narrative continuity through realistic depiction,
electing for the sensations of the felt rather than a representation of the real, a trait much like
Gertrude Stein’s depiction of objects in Tender Buttons (1914). As time passes, and Ashbery’s
poetry progresses, its ‘utterances’ can be read simultaneously as both ‘true’ and ‘false’ – ‘Clepsydra,’
true to the desire of Cubism to ascertain every side of the object and the Surrealist need to create
‘contact, unimaginably dazzling, between man and the world of things … and try to bring about the
greatest number of such communications’ (Breton 40), appeals to and courts both these
oppositions in presenting each without prejudice. The poetry, then, is a ‘serpentine | Gesture,’
modulating between its different stances, ironically hiding the suggested actual ‘truth’ of the work –
its Blanchotian recognition of its reality through self-negation – behind a ‘congruent | Message,’
which, suitably, is as about as effective as hiding the ‘sky’ behind ‘air.’ The voice of ‘Clepsydra’ is
also keenly self-aware of the sort of sentences Ashbery writes throughout the poem: long, winding,
and ‘serpentine,’ they are immensely difficult to grasp.1 In the construction of this dense prosody,
the speaker leaves the sense of the work open to the reader: it is laid bare, disguised flimsily only by
the language it directly presents itself in, which destructively tears apart, ‘limb by limb,’ the
certainty of its direction, looking back to the ambivalent first line of the poem in noting that the
‘sky’ has already mysteriously ‘pleaded’ its case in the poem, setting the unknown terms for the
vague argument to follow. ‘Clepsydra’ slides through these very inconstancies and appears to curtly
tell the reader that this is about as ‘graceful’ as it will get in perhaps explaining itself, as if the
‘creator who has momentarily turned away, | Marrying detachment with respect’ found that he
could not give up too much information. ‘Respect’ – for the reader, perhaps – can only be found
through ‘detachment.’ Ultimately, these moments are ‘the pieces’ that ‘Are seen as parts of a
spectrum, independent | Yet symbolic of their staggered times of arrival’ (Collected 140). This
‘moment’ in the poem, ‘staggered’ and broken at its time of ‘arrival’ though it may be, relates
broadly to how the rest of ‘Clepsydra’ will advance; how it will interact with its other moments as
they emerge and dissipate, maintaining the ethereality of the consciousness at work, as if hidden,
but truly unveiled, only by a hazy ‘air.’

In these brief moments of seeming, albeit challenging, clarity – moments looking back to the various
utterances of the speaker, moments demonstrating the dynamic nature of time, moments directly
reflecting on the autonomous poem itself – ‘Clepsydra’ refutes Harold Bloom’s assertion about it
‘being a beautiful failure … a poem that neither wants nor needs it readers … (it) sits on the page as
a forbiddingly solid wall of print’ (110). The kind of quasi-hostile, or at least nonchalant, poem that
Bloom describes would surely refuse what David Herd identifies as the ‘moments of relief’ that
mark ‘Clepsydra’ (108), which prove even in ‘the miserable totality | Mustered at any given
moment’ (Collected 141) there can still be some stability in the construction of the self. These may
be brief and fleeting sensations of wholeness, of complex explanation, but their brevity is true to the
work and the sensation of past and present time in ‘Clepsydra,’ heightened by the refusal of the
flowing language to coalesce into something that might be considered whole. The presence, in
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particular, of enjambment throughout ‘Clepsydra’ operates mainly by breaking various lines’

intonational units, or at least elongating the subject of the sentence so that the reader is seemingly
presented with sentences within sentences. What could be whole is rendered obsolete at the level
of the line itself, let alone the looping and interruptive sentences. Thus, there runs throughout the
poem a sense of dispersal and coalescence – which is ultimately its significance – what Ashbery
presumably identified as its ‘unity’ – fluctuating through the grammatical corrections of the
language itself. This is particularly evident in the persistence of the conjunction ‘but,’ which opens
many of its sentences, and thus launches new topics and considerations for the voice of ‘Clepsydra’
to work into its arguments:

But the condition

Of those moments of timeless elasticity and blindness

Was being joined secretly so

That their paths would cross again and be separated

Only to join again in a final assumption rising like a shout

And be endless in the discovery of the declamatory

Nature of the distance travelled. All this is

Not without small variations and surprises, yet

An invisible fountain continually destroys and refreshes the previsions.

(Collected 142)

The poem’s moments are ‘timeless,’ elastic in their ability to stretch out and onward, existent still in
memory as the self progresses through and by them. They are ‘endless’ in their crossings,
separations and joining, always ‘traveling’ and moving in rhythm with the poem, the ‘nature’ of
which is self-referentially ‘declaimed’ by the poem itself. Of course, as they progress, stretch out and
sever, there will be ‘small variations and surprises,’ yet the gurgling of the ‘fountain’ – a symbol of
the inherently circular nature of ‘Clepsydra,’ while being another image of water in motion to echo
the ‘water-clock’ of the title – ensures the continuation of these moments as a matter of destruction,
leading to a necessary reconstitution or reconsideration. The ‘previsions’ of the text’s immediate
language are constantly refreshed to ensure their immediacy in reading does not slacken and
become stale. Little reifies for long in ‘Clepsydra’; rather, it operates by temporary and ever-
revolving illumination and renewal, slipping in and out of darkness.

The stability of the ‘fountain’ and its ‘previsions’ as figurative devices, however, are drawn
immediately into question. ‘Clepsydra’ will not let such things rest easily and be suddenly
explainable as a network of symbols that can be unfolded to locate some paraphrasable meaning.
The speaker asks whether the ‘fountain’ and ‘previsions’’ ‘permanence (is) merely a function of |
The assurance with which it’s understood,’ which ultimately conditions the ‘result’ of their
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functioning: what they actually mean to a poem that inherently refuses such representative icons,
even as it continues to try to slip them in, lending the reader a false hope that there may be further
objective meaning below its busy surface. Again Rivers and Mountains operates via the
contradictory and unstable relations of its elements. It is the argument between time as
imperturbably ongoing and the desire of the consciousness to momentarily freeze it to find a sense
of wholeness in its staggering moment-by-moment overlapping stream. The ‘fountain’ promises a
partial explanation of the poem’s ‘timeless elasticity,’ yet it quickly negates not just the
‘permanence’ of its ‘function’ – that which would ensure constant renewal in the text – but the
matter of what has even been stated in the poem, beginning again with another ‘but’ to add more
consideration to a poem already heavily weighed down by its concessional corrections:

But there was no statement

At the beginning. There was only a breathless waste,

A dumb cry shaping everything in projected

After-effects orphaned by playing the part intended for them,

Though one must not forget that the nature of this

Emptiness, these previsions,

Was that it could only happen here, on this page held

Too close to be legible, sprouting erasures, except that they

Ended everything in the transparent sphere of what was

Intended only a moment ago, spiralling further out, its

Gesture finally dissolving in the weather.

(Collected 142)

‘Clepsydra’ becomes, again, intensely self-reflective, asking questions of what it means to include
objects like ‘fountains’ and ‘previsions’ into the text. It is a ‘dumb cry,’ a paradoxical voiceless voice
that ensures what is written, or said, may not ever necessarily be heard even as it shapes
‘everything in projected | After-effects.’ It is the echo of what was likely never there in the first
place. There are still occurrences and presences in the shadows of absence – and there can only be
absence if there is at first a presence. But, as the speaker notes, it is still all ‘emptiness,’ even the
refuelling ‘previsions,’ which can ‘only happen here, on this page held | Too close to be legible’: the
speaker is referring to the poem’s self-contained reality that, even should the reader attempt a close
reading, will evade meaning, ‘sprouting erasures’ to continue to negate any of its stability. It refuses
to give up on at least the idea of something being there, pointing instead to its transparency, rather
than its various ‘erasures.’ Even these considerations, emerging on the hump of the concessional
clause, ‘except,’ will eventually be dissolved by, and into, the shaping forces of the ‘weather’ –
‘hasn’t the sky?’ indeed. ‘Clepsydra’ comments on its need to be difficult to keep the reader guessing
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and maintain the argument. There can be no resolution, just further consideration eventually
dispersing and ‘dissolving’ in the ‘weather’ currents of the poem; its ‘imaginary feeling | Which still
protected its events and pauses’ (Collected 142) – the poem attempts to concretise its moments
with the false assurances of its internal imagination, bringing the reality of these very moments to
question.

The dominant ‘feeling’ of ‘Clepsydra,’ then, is of ‘emptiness.’ However, this does not presuppose that
the poem is without significance; that it is made somehow too shallow in the void it attempts to
establish beyond its surface:

And a feeling, again, of emptiness, but of richness in the way

The whole thing is organized, on what a miraculous scale,

Really what is meant by a human level, with the figures of the giants

Not too much bigger than the men who have come to petition them:

A moment that gave not only itself, but

Also the means of keeping it, of not turning to dust

Or gestures somewhere up ahead

But of becoming complicated like the torrent

In new dark passages, tears and laughter which

Are a sign of life, of distant life in this case.

(Collected 143)

The ‘moment,’ empty though it seems to be, is self-sufficient, freely giving ‘itself’ alongside the
methods of ‘keeping it’: it is immediate, referring obliquely to the initial ‘moment | Of utterance’ –
the work’s open-ended communicative endeavour – that drives the poem. This establishes the
‘richness’ of ‘Clepsydra’: how the ‘whole thing is organized’ along a shifting, subjective ‘scale’ to
whomever reads, maybe absorbs, it, even as this ‘scale’ is instantly probed by the speaker, equated,
problematically and simultaneously, with ‘humans’ and ‘giants.’ Neither perspective assumes any
greater importance than the other; rather, each establishes the possibility of a different and new
perspective. Yet, this is of course true to the self-admitted complications of the poem, striving to
enact a sense of time passing by, dragging in its wake ‘tears and laughter which | Are a sign of life,’
even if it is ‘distant,’ heard as an echo in the poem’s ‘dark passages.’ ‘Clepsydra’ is flexible and
always attempting to grow as it moves on, evading ‘turning to dust’ in its lively attempt to draw the
reader in to assist in its continual, self-sufficient movement. Accordingly, the stability of this
‘moment’ is undone and opened to a different consideration:

And yet, as always happens, there would come a moment when

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Acts no longer sufficed and the calm

Of this true progression hardened into shreds

Of another kind of calm, returning to the conclusion, its premises

Undertaken before any formal agreement had been reached, hence

A writ that was the shadow of the colossal reason behind all this

Like a second, rigid body behind the one you know is yours.

(Collected 143)

The parameters of the moment, of the various moments in ‘Clepsydra,’ assume their non-truth –
that is, their fleeting nature where they are both true in the immediate present and ‘non-absent’ as
they slide into the past. The ‘calm’ of the rich ‘emptiness’ of before is replaced by ‘another kind of
calm’: an unsettling stillness that looks back to the ‘reply that prompted the question’ as it skips
ahead to, presumably, ‘the conclusion’ of the poem; a ‘conclusion’ that is ‘returned to’ as if it has
already been reached and surpassed. The ‘writ,’ then, left mysterious and without identity – indeed,
merged bewilderingly into a ‘second, rigid body’ – provides the ‘colossal reason’ for the poem’s
existence, for the wandering, correcting musings of the speaker. The presence of this ‘colossal
reason’ provokes an anxiety in ‘Clepsydra,’ for the speaker fears such definitional meaning being
attached to the work, and its sudden demand of attention vainly blots ‘the contract’ – the ‘writ’ –
that had ‘been freely drawn up and consented to as insurance | Against the very condition it was
now so efficiently | Seeking to establish.’ It ironically both betrays the poem by ‘consenting’ to
assert this ‘colossal reason,’ yet is also true to the self-cancellations and self-sufficiency of the poem
itself which will render this moment as untrue in the present as any of the others already past in
the poem. It falls to the reader and ‘Clepsydra,’ both addressed through the fluid second person, to
protect the poem against this failure of the insurance: ‘Your acts | Are sentinels against this quiet |
Invasion’ (Collected 144). With this guardianship, the sensation of ‘Clepsydra’ can be broken down
to ‘a kind of very fine power or dust’ (Collected 143), easily scattered through the pages of the
poem, which it had previously seemed to try and avoid for just a moment of still and whole
reflection. Everything collapses in on itself – ‘hardened into shreds’ – as the moment attempts to
stay past its welcome, as the ‘invasion’ is pushed back.

This ‘shredding’ illustrates that, beyond the sonority of its voice, there is no singularity in
‘Clepsydra’: every drop of water through the aperture is different. It addresses both sides of its
vague argument; compares time as both an elongated moment and a moment-by-moment
proposition; and its speaker, though maintaining the same ‘serpentine’ voice, never quite seems to
fully emerge from its mostly impersonal, practical, grammatical-heavy language. The second-person
pronoun, ‘you,’ continually appears in the text as what seems like a form of semi-intimate address
to the reader, yet increasingly seems to be referring to the text itself, and therefore the speaker. It
acknowledges a consciousness achievable beyond singularity. Hegel writes that man
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reduplicates himself, existing for himself because he thinks himself … bringing himself into his own
consciousness so as to form an idea of himself … Man’s spiritual freedom consists in this
reduplicating process of human consciousness, whereby all that exists is made explicit within him
and all that is in him is realized without (34).

The significance and arrangement of the poem, existing ‘within’ and ‘without,’ ultimately, falls to
both reader and poem – ‘if only | You desire to arrange it this way’ (Collected 144). This self-
address, evident throughout Rivers and Mountains, is an attempt to engage with a world that can
only be apprehended – and, then, never fully – in the imagination. ‘Clepsydra,’ then, confesses to
nothing beyond the fact of its hesitant being. Its noticeably Cubistic approach emerges from exactly
this fluctuating being in a variable, unsteady, incomprehensible world; while, in the Surreal sense, it
attempts to join this world with the fictional reality of the text itself:

All kinds of things are possible in the widening angle of

The day, as it comes to blush with pleasure and increase,

So that light sinks into itself, becomes dark and heavy

Like a surface stained with ink: there was something

Not quite good or correct about the way

Things were looking recently: hasn’t the point

Of all this new construction been to provide

A protected medium for the exchanges each felt of such vital

Concern, and wasn’t it now giving itself the airs of a palace?

And yet her hair had never been so long.

(Collected 144)

It attempting to ensure and illustrate that ‘All kinds of things are possible’ in ‘Clepsydra,’ the
speaker, as seen with Cubism, attempts to simultaneously show all sides of the poem’s elements,
particularly as they reflect different notions of each other: its language, argument, self and even
time are objectified in their insistent place in the work. Light, then, through an antonymic
dissociation that often informs the progression of the poem, can quickly become ‘dark.’ The world
rushes into ‘Clepsydra’ and, in a literal appropriation of it, is equated with ‘a surface stained with
ink’: it becomes the poem, and the poem becomes the world as it assumes its reality. The speaker
interrupts this reasoning to self-consciously query these assertions, which, far from succeeding, are
‘Not quite good or correct.’ The ‘construction’ of ‘Clepsydra,’ ‘new’ and given some vague purpose to
be ‘A protected medium’ where it can, presumably, examine various ideas and reflect on time
without divulging anything certain to sustain the argument, has gone too far in its grandiose
eloquence and self-assertion, sarcastically, ironically even, noting how it has given itself ‘the airs of
a palace.’
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The immediate shift to an unidentified ‘her’ and ‘her hair’ attempts, it seems, to reground
‘Clepsydra’ in something more definite, even if the reader has no notion of who this woman is and
what may be the significance of ‘her hair.’1 Later in ‘Clepsydra,’ the speaker equates ‘hair’ with the
revealing ‘light’ of the poem, using ‘root’ to metonymically associate it with a ‘tree’: ‘and so keep its
root in darkness until your | Maturity when your hair will actually be the branches | Of a tree with
the light pouring through them’ (Collected 145). Now seemingly become a common symbol of
nature or life, illumination emerges through hair: humanity grows to become a neutral part in the
flow of nature. Important also is that the speaker returns again to the imprecise ‘you,’ as though
asking the reader, the speaker and the poem, whether it is permissible for there to now be ‘a feeling
of well-being.’ The poem’s continual movement would seem to resist that very ‘feeling’; yet it has
similarly promised calm in the emptiness of its passing moments. Ultimately, the speaker
simultaneously addresses the poem and the reader with a truism that informs the elongations of
‘Clepsydra’: ‘The past is yours, to keep invisible if you wish | But also to make absurd elaborations
with | And in this way prolong your dance of non-discovery’ (Collected 144). The journey is the
important factor – the flow of the poem – what is made of it is irrelevant: it is a self-cancelling ‘non-
discovery.’ ‘I mean now something much broader’ the speaker appropriately intones as ‘Clepsydra’
opens itself further: ‘In this way any direction taken was the right one, | Leading first to you, and
through you to | Myself that is beyond you and which is the same thing as space’ (Collected 145). All
the ‘directions’ of ‘Clepsydra’ are simultaneously explored – its meaning unfolded to such
expansiveness as to be essentially non-existent: the second person leads back to the first that
instead of solidifying becomes ‘space’ – opening the poem up to the world and all the people who
encounter it, which it is similarly trying to appropriate.

As ‘Clepsydra’ edges to its closure – or, perhaps more appropriately, open ending – the speaker
introduces in contrast to the feminine ‘her,’ who seems in constant development, a more static ‘he’:

It seemed he had been repeating the same stupid phrase

Over and again throughout his life; meanwhile

Infant destinies had suavely matured; there was

To be a meeting or collection of them that very evening.

He was out of it of course for having lain happily awake

On the tepid fringes of that field or whatever

Whose center was beginning to churn darkly, but even more for having

The progression of minutes by accepting them, as one accepts drops of rain

As they form a shower, and without worrying about the fine weather that will come
after.

(Collected 145)
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In the context of the arguments in ‘Clepsydra,’ the apparent failure of this ‘he’ is his waking
acceptance of the sameness of existence in a poem that consistently rejects such an apprehensible
stream of time, dwelling as it so frequently does in the irrational duration of a dream, never
‘repeating the same stupid phrase,’ but rather the bewildering terms of its almost impenetrable
discussion. Around him, then, ‘Infant destinies’ mature ‘suavely,’ indicating how distant he is from
the smooth development of ‘Clepsydra,’ enhanced further by the ‘meeting’ which he will not attend
– a ‘collection’ from which he is isolated. His position is made unspecific and separate by his vague
location, where he is, importantly, ‘happily,’ but perhaps also naively, ‘awake.’ This space, beginning
as a ‘field,’ is opened up by the ambiguous conjunction ‘or,’ which establishes the field both as, and
as not, ‘whatever’; a ‘whatever’ – or should it be ‘wherever’? – that shifts its stability, its ‘light,’ as its
‘center’ turns to a typically fluctuating dark. He, however, will never progress in this sudden
transformation, for he just accepts ‘The progression of minutes’ that flow past him without ever
grasping them – as one lets rain run off their bodies, only conscious of the moment itself, and not
the ‘weather’ to follow or even the building of the clouds that predated the precipitation. He stands
outside the argument of ‘Clepsydra,’ and thus does not belong, incapable of asking, ‘Why shouldn’t
all climate and all music be equal | Without growing?’ (Collected 145) – because they must ‘grow’
lest they become stagnant and grind the world to an undesired halt. He is trapped in this very space,
occupied by a speaker who knows the futility of the mysterious man’s desire to dwell only in the
moment:

There should be an invariable balance of

Contentment to hold everything in place, ministering

To stunted memories, helping them stand alone

And return into the world, without ever looking back at

What they might have become, even though in doing so they

Might just once have been the truth that, invisible

Still surrounds us like the air and is the dividing force

Between our slightest steps and the notes taken on them.

(Collected 145-46)

Should there be some contrivance to assist ‘stunted memories’ to slot into the ‘serpentine’ world
and flow of time, they will still be subject to the possibility of succumbing to the poem’s ‘truth’ – or
‘invisible’ non-truth – of the memory invading the present, turning it into a kind of faux past. They
are memories which could have grown out from their ‘stunted’ nature to become ‘like the air’:
paradoxically all-enveloping and ‘dividing’ like the subjectivity of the truth it purports to be
brandishing as secure. Yet, they are only ‘notes’: reminders of what was and is no longer. They
remain ‘stunted’: there is no ‘balance | Of contentment,’ just the lingering sense of flux the man
cannot grasp.
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‘It is because everything is relative’ that ‘Clepsydra’ cannot bind itself to a narrative from which
meaning can be wrought. Such narratives only serve to stabilise the action of the text and give
definitional weight to the things within it by something that essentially limits it from without. The
sense of Synthetic Cubism throughout Rivers and Mountains and in ‘Clepsydra’ works towards
internalising the poetries’ objects to examine their various relations, which, in turn, assists in
creating a Surreal reality. And although the collage practice in ‘The Skaters’ – and suggestively in
the literary allusions or echoes throughout the book – allow a tension to develop between the
external world and the world of the poem, the focus lies in how the work defamiliarises and takes
ownership of these elements. ‘Clepsydra,’ in its very circularity leading to its intense inward gaze, is
the apex of this practice in Rivers and Mountains. ‘Truth’ is at the level of the autonomous text and
the reader who engages it lets it take them through its flowing machinations. It is no longer about
reshaping and reconsidering art or poetry, but about projecting a sensation of life as poetry.
Reading it ‘Is not a question, then, | Of having lived in vain,’ but rather experiencing a sensation of
‘living’ itself – there is no past tense, just the moment itself with all that impinges on it:

What is meant is that this distant

Image of you, the way you really are, is the test

Of how you see yourself, and regardless of whether or not

You hesitate, it may be assumed that you have won, that this

Wooden and external representation

Returns the full echo of what you meant

With nothing left over, from that circumference now alight

With ex-possibilities become present fact

(Collected 146)

The poem becomes the ‘distant | Image of you’: the poet, reader and poem itself. How ‘you see
yourself,’ then, becomes a matter of how ‘Clepsydra’ presents itself and how it is approached. Its
notion of ‘truth’ exists in this open appeal, in laying itself bare. It may wryly refer to itself as a
‘Wooden and external representation,’ but even in this static self-identification, it can still ‘echo’
meaning, while simultaneously allowing for the terms of this meaning and representation to be
altered – ‘ex-possibilities become present fact.’ The last two lines then hint at exactly the notion of
change and the place of time in this insistent alteration: ‘while morning is still and before the body |
Is changed by the faces of evening’ (Collected 146). Light and dark mingle one last time, exposing
how they too are subject to the movement of time – from ‘morning’ till ‘evening’ and all the
moments in between. The written work, the poem, recognises the ‘truth’ of Hegel’s ‘Thing Itself’ –
‘everything which … maintains the model, the essence, and the spiritual truth’ of the work
(Blanchot 308) – and this is the ultimate achievement of the self-realising work of writing aware of
its negation and ‘death’: the recognition of reality – of self – in the work of creating and receiving a
text. In the work’s disappearance it achieves its truth as the individuals who encounter the text
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merge with the work and bring it to self-consciousness. ‘Clepsydra’ looks ahead to the postmodern
abstraction of Three Poems in its elimination of any ‘truth’ of the stable object subjected to Cubist
synthesis and Surrealist negation. Only the experience of poetry, Ashbery’s ideal subject, remains.