Birds Eye View Of The Tool And Die Co - Analysis

Morning clarity that immediately blurs

The poem opens as if it will tell a straightforward life story: For a long time I used to get up early. But Ashbery immediately derails that expectation with a comic, bodily inventory: 20-30 vision, hemorrhoids intact. The central claim the poem keeps worrying is that the self we think we can report on plainly—habits, health, perception—doesn’t hold its shape once it enters time. Even the man who checks into the / Enclosure of time can only familiariz[e] dreams, as if consciousness is a hotel you register at, not a home you own.

The self as something that gets rubbed away

What time does here is not dramatic destruction but slow abrasion: The edges rub off, / The slant gets lost. Those phrases make identity feel like an object with corners and angle—something that once had a distinctive “slant”—now smoothed into sameness. The poem sharpens that into a social sting: Whatever the villagers / Are celebrating with less conviction is / The less you. The “villagers” suggest community rituals, but the point isn’t pastoral; it’s about how public meaning and private selfhood drain simultaneously. When communal celebration loses conviction, the speaker doesn’t just feel alienated; he becomes smaller, reduced to a remainder.

Organ-music, gang-wars, ice cream: a mind cataloging noise

Ashbery’s list-like rush—Index of own organ-music playing, then Machinations over the architecture, then meditated / Gang-wars, ice cream, loss—reads like a mind trying to keep an inventory of what’s happening inside and outside at once. The “organ-music” is intimate and bodily (your own internal soundtrack), while “gang-wars” and “architecture” imply external systems and conflicts; “ice cream” sits absurdly among them, not as relief but as proof that experience won’t sort itself into appropriate categories. The parenthetical too / Light to make much of a dent suggests the speaker’s schemes—his “machinations”—lack weight against the heavier pressures of history, violence, grief. The tone here is wry but also tired: a consciousness noticing its own flimsy leverage.

Living backward: improvisation that can’t escape the past

The second stanza gives a bleak rule of motion: Surface is improvisation. Life looks ad-libbed, made up as it goes along, but the force underneath is paradoxical: Living hopelessly backward into a past. That contradiction—improvisation on the surface, backward drift underneath—captures a particular kind of modern helplessness: you can make new gestures, but your direction of travel is still determined by what has already happened. Even conversation is marked as patterned and belated, a past of striped / Conversations, as though talk comes in repeating bands, like old wallpaper or uniforms.

The mirrored desert and the fear of where speech ends

The poem’s anxiety spikes around endings and boundaries: As long as none of them ends this side / Of the mirrored desert. A “mirrored desert” is both emptiness and self-reflection—an expanse where you only meet your own image, multiplied. The phrase terrorist chorales makes that space vocal and threatening, as if even collective song has been weaponized. The tension is stark: the speaker wants conversations not to “end” before reaching whatever truth lies beyond the mirror, but he also imagines that beyond as a place where voices become coercive. Speech is desired and distrusted at the same time.

The coastal turn: beauty becomes a restriction

Then the poem pivots into a scene that feels suddenly legible: You turn / To speak to someone beside the dock. After the abstract “enclosure” and the “mirrored desert,” we’re placed by a lighthouse, with a car, a home, a coast, and small cliffs. The lighthouse Shines like garnets—a concentrated, jewel-red beauty—but the final sentence reverses the comfort we might expect from a guiding light: It has become a stricture. The lighthouse, meant to orient and rescue, becomes a tightening band, a rule, a narrowing. In other words, even clarity—seeing the shore, seeing the light—can harden into constraint. The poem ends not with arrival but with a sense that the very thing that should guide you can also hem you in.

What if the lighthouse is the need to make sense?

If the “surface” is improvisation, the lighthouse may be the mind’s demand for a fixed meaning anyway: a beam that insists on one path through darkness. But the poem keeps showing how meanings get smoothed, how edges rub off, how celebration thins into less conviction. So the final chill is this: is the “stricture” safety, or is it the moment when interpretation becomes another enclosure of time?