Token Resistance

As one turns to one in a dream
smiling like a bell that has just
stopped tolling, hold out a book
and speaks: “All the vulgarity

of time, from the Stone Age
to our present, with its noodle parlors
and token resistance, is as a life
to the life that is given you. Wear it,”

so must one descend from checkered heights
that are our friends, needlessly
rehearsing what we will say
as a common light bathes us,

a common fiction reverberates as we pass
to the celebration. Originally
we weren’t going to leave home. But made bold
somehow by the rain we put our best foot forward.

Now it’s years after that. It
isn’t possible to be young anymore.
Yet the tree treats me like a brute friend;
my own shoes have scarred the walk I’ve taken.

Notes on the Poem
What is the message underlying the cryptic but alluring whimsy of John Ashbery's poem "Token Resistance", from his 2008 Griffin Poetry Prize winning collection Notes from the Air? Perhaps different readers receive different messages, but there is definitely something there for all of us to unearth.

"As one turns to one in a dream"

alerts us from the outset that we are entering a gently surreal terrain, with a logic all its own. The images floating past - the bell, the book, the noodle parlors - are intriguing, but just might be red herrings. We can't seem to trust our friends either, as the enigmatic phrase "checkered heights" seems to suggest. But we're with them anyhow, and "as a common light bathes us", that seems kind of comforting. And hey, we're on our way to a celebration ...

As we're pondering here, so did poet Carol Rumens with a more recent Ashbery poem, the eponymous "Breezeway" from his 2015 collection. She comments on the "generous measure of fun" that could be masking intimations of violence and disconnection in that poem. Is that what we're looking for here?

The titular phrase "token resistance" in the second stanza might be part of a message hiding in plain sight. Let's read in full what "one" says here:

"All the vulgarity

of time, from the Stone Age
to our present, with its noodle parlors
and token resistance, is as a life
to the life that is given you. Wear it,"

Is "wearing it" perhaps something like "owning it", a hopeful exhortation to accept "the life that is given you"? Rumen's consideration of "Breezeway" has some helpful advice:

"There may be more wisdom in not researching Ashbery’s meanings. Why not be Taoist about it and go with the flow, enjoying the surreality as the words decide for themselves how to join hands and ride the narrative breeze?"

In that very way, this poem might also being encouraging us to "go with the flow", even if and when

"my own shoes have scarred the walk I've taken."