Strange Occupations - Analysis

A love poem disguised as a junk drawer

The poem reads like a speaker pawing through shared memories with you—not to reconstruct a neat past, but to prove that an intimacy existed and still exerts pressure. The opening is almost stubbornly plain: dry kind of cookies, only a little sugar, Wheatena. These specifics don’t decorate the scene; they certify it. They say: this happened, and I knew you closely enough to know your odd breakfast. Yet Ashbery immediately turns that ordinary proof into something stranger: the memories begin to behave less like a timeline than like a mind trying to keep a bond alive by any means, even by leaping.

The shared past: suburban green, moral signage, and sweaty bodies

That bond is staged as a series of small expeditions: fish for kelp, then arriving at a town with a relaxed, suburban name, then noticing how the trees were Greener than an embarrassed lawn in April. The comparison makes the landscape feel psychologically charged: this isn’t just green; it’s green that shames other greens, the way one life can shame another by seeming easier. The speaker wants the life contained in that town—How we would like to live there—but adds a crucial caveat: and not in a different life. That contradiction is a central ache: they want an elsewhere that doesn’t require becoming someone else.

Even their bodies are trapped in the wrong climate: they sweltered in union suits, comic and uncomfortable, like children wearing an adult category of hardship. And the world offers them only crude, prepackaged exits: signs marked Answer and Repent. They tried both, as if salvation were a vending machine. The tone here is wry, but it’s also tender toward their earnestness—two people willing to experiment with whatever a culture claims will fix them.

Velvet daylight and the courage that was “always ours”

A hinge arrives with Then—surprise! and the almost theatrical entrance of Velvet daylight. Daylight isn’t just illumination; it’s a soft force that back us up, like a friend or a witness. It lends courage, yet the poem insists that this courage was always ours—they simply didn’t know how to access it downstairs. That last phrase is funny and haunting at once: courage is imagined as something stored in the basement of the self, close and yet locked behind domestic architecture. The poem’s faith in an inner resource is immediately undercut by the implication that they never learned the ordinary mechanism of reaching it.

Crawling to wonders until the eyelid withdraws

After daylight arrives, the pair’s togetherness becomes dreamlike: We used to crawl to events, as though movement itself required humility or injury. What they reach is part grotesque, part enchanted: a symphony / of hogs in a lilac tree. The ugliness of hogs and the sweetness of lilac collide, producing a beauty that doesn’t resolve into good taste. And the line until the eyelid withdrew suggests that much of what they experienced depended on being seen—or on the world’s permission to see. The eyelid might be sleep, censorship, adulthood closing its eye, or simply the end of a shared trance. In any case, the wonders don’t end because they are exhausted; they end because perception changes.

“Now I can sample your shorts”: intimacy turns embarrassing, then dangerous

The present tense arrives abruptly and strangely physical: Now I can sample your shorts. The phrase is intimate but also absurdly consumerish, as if closeness has been reduced to sampling a product. Immediately the speaker insists: So much more is there for us now—and yet the very image of that more is threatening: runnels that can drown the indifferent one who merely sticks his toe in them. The poem’s promise of abundance comes with a warning: increased feeling, increased knowledge, increased light can also overwhelm someone who approaches it casually. Even indifference is not safe; it is punishable by immersion.

The office tomorrow, the clavier, and a plea against the backdraft

The closing questions snap the poem from reverie into obligation: To whose office shall we go tomorrow? After cookies and kelp and velvet daylight, an office is almost brutally mundane—an institution replacing the town they wanted to live in. Yet the speaker still reaches for art: the new recording of clavier variations, a desire for patterned beauty and controlled change. Then the poem breaks into alarm: Oh, help us someone! The request is not abstract; it names what must be extinguished: the night and the fire, especially the fire’s backdraft, which is humming her old song of antipathies. The gendered her makes hostility feel like a familiar, seductive force—an old refrain that returns whenever the light tries to increase.

A sharp question the poem leaves open

If Much, much more light is truly available now, why does the speaker end by begging for rescue? The poem seems to suspect that illumination is not the opposite of danger but one of its forms: as the day brightens, the currents deepen, and the old song of antipathies grows easier to hear.