Invasive Procedures - Analysis

A poem that keeps being interrupted by its own mouth

The poem’s central pressure is this: the speaker wants to make something pleasing and legible, yet everything he says immediately turns invasive—dirty, surveilled, self-canceling. From the opening, boundaries don’t hold. Massachusetts rests its feet in another state, a casual trespass that turns quickly into verbal contamination: cows slip in crowshit. Even grammar behaves like a body losing control. That early slide sets up the poem’s larger pattern: each attempt at a clean gesture—song, gift, love address, moral counsel—gets crossed by betrayal, bureaucratic scrutiny, or a sudden wet darkness.

“OK, let’s go”: the demand to please, and the trap it creates

A conspicuous intrusion arrives when the speaker admits he may have been called upon to write a different poem. The phrase sounds like a public request, a commission, maybe even an interrogation—language as duty. His response, OK, let’s go, is jaunty, but also resigned. The promise I want to please everybody is so broad it becomes impossible, and the poem behaves as if it knows that: it launches into my song only to make the song a story of being misunderstood, accused, and processed. The “invasive procedures” aren’t only medical; they’re social and linguistic—demands that cut into the private self and force it to perform.

The melon gift that becomes evidence

The “song” begins like a whimsical romance—In Beethoven Street, a melon exchanged—but the melon itself is suspiciously hybrid: Round and pronged, secret juice. It’s both ripe and weaponlike, tender and barbed. That doubleness matters because the receiver answers the gift with a handoff to authority: handed me over to the police. The betrayal is immediate and oddly polite, as if this is simply how exchanges work in this world: intimacy becomes evidence, and pleasure becomes probable cause. Even the police are sure of their story: he is the spy they’ve sought for seven months, a detail that gives the surreal scene a dossier-like specificity. The speaker’s very presence in the song invites a searchlight.

Questions as a defense, and the strange freedom they buy

At the station, the poem offers its clearest model of resistance: my answers were always questions. It’s comic, but it’s also a philosophy. To answer would be to submit to the police’s frame; to ask questions is to keep meaning unsettled, to refuse the invasive procedure of being “known.” The result is paradoxical: they release him, Exasperated by their inability to answer. Freedom arrives not as vindication but as a glitch in the system, an administrative failure to pin him down. The triumphant I was a free man! sounds real for a beat, yet it’s immediately complicated by what he does with that freedom: he walks up Rilke Street and starts chanting a private hymn, as if poetry itself is both refuge and compulsion.

A moral warning that lands on a grandmother’s couch

The hymn’s advice—Beware the monsters, and don’t become one—could be the poem’s “pleasing” content, a tidy wisdom statement. But Ashbery makes it drift into odd comfort: Time is kind to them, and time will take care of you too, asleep on your grandmother’s couch, sipping cherry juice. The moral edge softens into drowsy domesticity, and the pronouns blur: are we warning a lover, consoling ourselves, or hypnotizing an audience? The tension here is sharp: monsters are real enough to fear, yet the poem can’t keep fear from turning into sweetness. Even “care” feels ambivalent—care as protection, or care as being handled.

The hinge: pigs through screens, then the poem denies its own love-story

The poem’s most decisive turn comes with the abrupt, almost childlike question: How did the pigs get through window screens at night? It’s a sudden invasion of the home, but it’s also an invasion of the poem’s narrative stability. By morning it was all over resets the world as if nothing happened. Then the speaker performs an even harsher reset: I had never sung to you, you never coaxed me. The poem withdraws its own premise—the “song,” the “you,” the balcony—like a witness recanting. Yet the feeling doesn’t disappear; it relocates to a broader, colder image: all trains run into the night that collects them like paper streamers and puts them in a drawer. Motion becomes storage. Desire becomes filing. The tone shifts here from whimsical paranoia to a more elegiac bureaucracy, where even travel ends as an object in a closed space.

Crow’s feet in sunlight: trying to hold the “you” in place

After the recantation, the speaker admits he’s Unable to leave the sight of the beloved, and he responds with a small, almost pathetic act: he draws little crow’s feet in a notebook. The crow returns from the opening’s dirty punning, but now it’s tender and precise—tiny marks made in sunlight after a sudden day of tears. The poem’s contradiction intensifies: the speaker denies the relationship happened, yet he behaves like someone faithfully grieving it. He waits to be reconciled not to daylight but to the fascinating madness of the dark, a phrase that makes darkness both threatening and irresistibly meaningful. The “invasive” force is now internal: he can’t stop looking, can’t stop making marks, can’t stop moving toward the dark that undoes him.

What if the real “monster” is the poem’s appetite?

If the hymn warns against becoming a monster, the poem quietly asks whether the act of turning life into imagery is its own kind of predation. A melon becomes police evidence; tears become a “sudden day”; trains become office supplies in a drawer. The speaker keeps transforming others—the you, the mistress, the police—into material. Is that transformation a way of surviving, or a way of using everything?

The mistress, the cords, and the final ledge

The Shakespearean echo—My mistress’ hands—arrives like another attempt to “please everybody” by borrowing a recognizable love-poem posture, but it’s immediately negated: her hands are nothing like these. Hands should touch; here they are busy collecting silken cords for some future storm, when the wet wind plunges through colossal apertures. The scale suddenly enlarges: from notebook crow’s feet to architectural gaps and wind like an intrusion into a body. Then the poem reaches its bleakest clarity: Suddenly I was out of hope. The speaker crawled out on the ledge, an image that turns the earlier “invasions” into a self-directed procedure—he places himself where there is no room left to evade. Yet the ending is not simply doom: the air is frank and pure, unlike the frayed December night. After all the slippage, dirt, and surveillance, the poem offers one clean sensation—but it’s found only at the edge, where hope has already failed.