Mottled Tuesday - Analysis

A mind bracing for the next absurd mishap

The poem’s central motion is a speaker trying to stay upright inside a world that keeps turning everything into a joke at the speaker’s expense. It opens with a premonition: Something was about to go laughably wrong. That phrase sets the key contradiction: the danger is real enough to anticipate, but it arrives wearing clown shoes. From the start, the speaker can’t even locate where the trouble belongs—directly at home or here—as if anxiety has dissolved the map. The poem reads like consciousness catching itself mid-swerve: it senses collapse, then tries to narrate the collapse before it happens, which is also a way of trying to control it.

Even the place the speaker stands on is unstable: a random shoal that is pleading with its eyes, an oddly human desperation assigned to sand and water. The shoal then breaks loose, and the cause isn’t weather but language: a hail of references. In Ashbery’s logic, the world doesn’t only erode physically; it erodes under the pressure of allusions, cues, and context—everything meaning-laden pelting the moment until it can’t hold together.

Retail piled on top of feeling

Right after that, the speaker shrugs and contributes to the mess: I’ll add one more scoop to the pile of retail. The line is funny, but it’s also bleakly precise: daily life is rendered as accumulation, not experience. Retail isn’t just shopping; it’s the idea that the world arrives prepackaged as options, surfaces, and transactions. The speaker is both criticizing it and participating, which sharpens the poem’s tension: the speaker sees the machine and still feeds it.

The sudden tenderness of a “laundry boat”

The poem’s emotional pivot comes with the address: Hey, you’re doing it. Suddenly there’s a you—part companion, part self—named through a string of surreal endearments: my sinking laundry boat, my white pomegranate, my swizzle stick. These objects don’t match, and that mismatch matters. A laundry boat suggests domestic overflow and an attempt to float chores; sinking admits the attempt is failing. A white pomegranate takes a symbol of seeds, desire, and underworld myth and bleaches it—fertility turned pale, maybe sanitized. A swizzle stick is pure garnish, a tool for stirring sweetness into a drink. The speaker’s affection is real, but it’s spoken in the language of odds and ends, as if intimacy has to borrow whatever props the day provides.

Calling the addressee a point of departure makes that intimacy functional too: this you is also a way out. Yet the next line insists, We’re leaving again of our own volition, and the insistence sounds defensive. If you have to say you chose it, maybe you didn’t. The poem keeps wobbling between agency and drift, like trying to walk on that earlier shoal.

Bogus plains, canals, and the ghosts that don’t stop

The destination is both grand and fake: bogus patterned plains streaked by canals, capped with the hedging maybe. It’s a landscape that looks designed—patterned, streaked—like a brochure or a screen saver, and the speaker doesn’t fully believe in it. Then come the Amorous ghosts, which turn the poem’s emotional history into a pursuing force. They chase for a time, but their most unsettling trait is not malice; it’s incompetence: they get confused and forget to stop. That detail makes the haunting feel like momentum rather than intention—old desires and old stories continuing past the point where they make sense, still populate the fertile land with bizarre self-imaginings. The speaker’s world is crowded with projections that reproduce themselves.

Corporate comfort-talk as a survival spell

The ending shifts into a voice that sounds like instructions from a call center, a pop-up window, or an anxious friend imitating both: Here’s hoping the referral goes tidily; Chime authoritatively with the pop-ups; Keep your units pliable. This is care translated into systems-language. It’s soothing in rhythm but chilling in implication: the self is broken into units that must be kept folded and compliant. Even the recourse is reduced to a mere specter, as if real help has been replaced by the idea of help.

The final imperative is the poem’s darkest joke: Don’t be able to make that distinction. After invoking the new day and its abominable antithesis, the speaker tells the addressee to surrender the ability to tell them apart. What began as a fear of something going wrong ends as a strategy for enduring wrongness: blur the categories so the contradictions can’t hurt you. The poem doesn’t celebrate confusion; it shows confusion becoming a refuge, a last way to keep moving when everything is already a hail of references.