Crossroads In The Past - Analysis

The wrong wind as a symptom, not a fact

The poem’s central claim is that what feels wrong in a relationship or a life is often less a single event than a misalignment in how we narrate time: we keep hunting for a cause, a wrong direction, when the deeper trouble is our need for a clean origin story. The opening image of wind in forsythia bushes is immediately argued with: one voice insists it was a wrong one, another counters with the biblical-sounding It bloweth where it listeth. That disagreement matters because it isn’t really about weather; it’s about whether experience can be judged against a rule. The mention of making love there are no rules pushes the same point: if desire and wind are both lawless, then calling something wrong is already a kind of storytelling—an attempt to impose a direction on what may not have one.

Conversation that won’t let the subject drop

Ashbery stages the poem as a slippery back-and-forth, where the speaker tries to protect a mystery and then can’t resist reopening it. Something went wrong is declared, then immediately hedged: Just don’t ask me what it was, then Pretend I’ve dropped the subject. The tone here is lightly comic—someone insisting they won’t talk about it while obviously talking about it—but the comedy has an edge, because the poem shows how intimacy can turn into interrogation. The partner’s insistence—wanting to know exactly what seems wrong—creates a key tension: the desire for clarity versus the speaker’s sense that clarity might be a false promise. The question In what way do things get to be wrong? sounds philosophical, but it’s also defensive; it keeps the conversation abstract to avoid naming the wound.

Two-handed living: cellphone and shovel

The poem’s unease becomes physical in the odd, split image of the speaker dialing a cellphone with one hand while digging at obscure pebbles with a shovel with the other. It’s a portrait of a mind trying to be in the present and the past at once: the cellphone suggests modern immediacy, while the shovel suggests excavation. Out of that digging, something like braids stand out on horsehair cushions—a strange “found” pattern that feels like memory’s way of surfacing: not a clear fact, but a texture, a trace. Even the word lugubrious applied to an armchair implies the room is weighted with mood, as if furniture can inherit the relationship’s heaviness. The proposed fixes—change all the furniture, fumigate the house—are both practical and absurdly total, like trying to disinfect a story rather than face what it contains.

The real culprit: the beginnings concept

The poem turns sharply when the speaker suggests what’s wrong is the beginnings concept. That phrase is both funny and devastating: it makes beginnings sound like a consumer idea someone could discard, yet the speaker can’t let it go. I aver there are no beginnings is a bold claim, then instantly qualified: though there were perhaps some. The contradiction is the poem’s emotional engine. The speaker wants relief from the pressure of origins—first causes, first promises, first mistakes—yet can’t deny that certain moments do feel like thresholds. By naming beginnings as the problem, the poem suggests that insisting on an origin point can poison the present: you start treating the relationship like a case with a discoverable initial error, rather than something continuously made and remade.

The movie theater memory where names blur

After all the abstraction, the poem gives a concrete scene: stopping to look at a poster outside a movie theater, being drawn in by lobby cards, sitting at the end of a row in a crowded balcony. The details are ordinary, but the revelation inside them is uncanny: the day we first realized we didn’t fully know our names, yours or mine. This is the poem’s deepest wrongness—not betrayal or cruelty, but a sudden doubt about identity itself, as if intimacy has exposed how provisional the self is. They left quietly amid gray snow, with Twilight already set in: the world doesn’t end, but it dims. The tone here is hushed and chilled, and it reframes everything earlier. The wrong direction wind becomes another way of saying: at some point, our story stopped feeling like it belonged to us.

A sharper question the poem won’t answer

If you can’t fully know your own name, what exactly would it mean to talk our relationship back to its beginnings? The poem flirts with renovation—new furniture, fumigation—as if the past were a room you could refurbish. But the final image of quiet departure suggests the opposite: that the most decisive moments are not repaired; they are merely walked out of, into weather and dusk.