Brand Loyalty - Analysis

Collecting as a way to keep the world steady

The poem’s central comedy is also its central fear: the speakers try to treat reality like a set of manageable possessions. It opens with the accusation you’re destroying the collectibles! and the father’s blithe correction, I’m enjoying them! Enjoyment becomes a defense against loss—if he can call damage appreciation, then nothing is really being taken away. Even his memory turns into a kind of varnish: the green magenta finish leads to the piano shawl in Harbin, a private, portable past that can be laid over the present. Against this, the line At least we have the lilacs lands like a nervous attempt to name one stable, living thing they still possess.

The father’s “creativity” and the need to scold nature

Ashbery gives the father a voice that is funny but also revealingly desperate. The speaker says he’d get a little too creative, as if imagination itself is a form of risk. That “creativity” shows up as complaint: he’s been chiding the waterspout, talking to it like a misbehaving customer. His rant—I’ve had it with natural phenomena—turns weather into a moral failure: nature never know[s] when to draw the line. The joke is that his scolding assumes a contract the world never signed. Calling humans natural phenomena too is meant to restore parity, but it accidentally erases the very distinction he needs in order to feel safe.

The turn: the waterspout stops being “out there”

The poem pivots when the speaker admits, it is getting to us. What begins as spectacle—something to critique, to manage with language—becomes immediate threat: only a moment ago it was in front of us. The suggested response, sidle along the sand, is almost politely provisional, as if catastrophe could be handled with careful manners and footwork. Even agreement is hedged: On the other hand recurs like a nervous tic, a habit of postponing commitment when the world is no longer postponing anything.

Hospitality as denial, retribution as a prewritten script

The line We could offer it tea and cookies is one of the poem’s sharpest bits of tonal whiplash: domestic hospitality is invoked at the exact moment it’s useless. The poem’s dread isn’t only that disaster is coming, but that the mind will meet it with stale, rehearsed categories—palsied brooding and the tired theme of retribution. Someone (engineers? fate? history?) has built these forces stronger and stronger until violence is encoded in them, as if the waterspout were a machine programmed to perform inevitability. Yet the speakers still claim modest desires: a little peace is all we were after. That tension—between wanting smallness and being targeted by something enormous—drives the poem’s unease.

“Don’t alarm the surroundings”: choosing spectacle over escape

One of the poem’s strangest contradictions is its refusal to flee cleanly. we can’t alarm our surroundings too much arrives alongside the admission that the surroundings torture us. The reason given is chillingly theatrical: otherwise they would slip out of pain and miss the exciting denouement. In other words, they half-collaborate with their own undoing because narrative satisfaction—seeing how it ends—competes with self-preservation. The morning is described as sweet-tempered, as though the world’s mood were a social cue they ought to respect, and then the cosmology turns absurdly bureaucratic: God has us on hold. Human agency becomes mere motion: spin like dervishes, human tops, hair rising into a kind of spire even after the speaker tried to keep it neat, having brush[ed] down the sides. Grooming and order are no match for the physics of being swept up.

The final metamorphosis: becoming the “brand” called a village

By the end, the threat isn’t only impact but assimilation. The village is walking toward us, and then the poem erases the boundary between people and place: we are becoming its walls, its graffiti-sprayed cement bathrooms, its general store, even the tipsy taxi driver. It’s a nightmare of total incorporation, where identity is reduced to public surfaces and small-town functions. In that light, the title Brand Loyalty reads like a grim joke: loyalty to “brands” (collectibles, lilacs, civility, the story’s denouement) is really loyalty to ready-made identities the world can stamp onto you once you’re pliable enough. The speaker’s last tease—If I told you it wouldn’t be a surprise, and yet it would…—captures the poem’s final instability: even foreknowledge can’t stabilize what’s happening, because the self that would “know” is dissolving into the scenery.

A sharper question the poem forces

When the speaker insists they shouldn’t alarm our surroundings, is that politeness—or a kind of loyalty to the very system that’s swallowing them? The poem keeps offering small consolations—lilacs, tea and cookies, a sweet-tempered morning—but each one looks, on second glance, like training for compliance: how to keep smiling while the waterspout and the village decide what you are.

Ending on a throwaway line that isn’t throwaway

The last line—Sounds like my friend Casper, spoken by the girl—snaps the poem into a new social register: casual recognition, like gossip at the edge of apocalypse. It’s funny, but it also completes the poem’s demotion of the sublime into the familiar. Everything, even annihilating strangeness, gets filed under somebody you vaguely know. That’s the poem’s bleakest comfort: the mind’s talent for making the unmanageable feel like a known “brand,” even as it’s in the act of remaking you into a wall, a bathroom, a store, a driver—anything but the person who began by trying to save the collectibles.