Some Trees: Poems Read online

  Behind the lace of their aspiring

  Opinions. And heaven will not care,

  To raise our love

  In scathing hymns. So beware and

  Bye now. The jewels are for luck.

  The Pied Piper

  Under the day’s crust a half-eaten child

  And further sores which eyesight shall reveal

  And they live. But what of dark elders

  Whose touch at nightfall must now be

  To keep their promise? Misery

  Starches the host’s one bed, his hand

  Falls like an axe on her curls:

  “Come in, come in! Better that the winter

  Blaze unseen, than we two sleep apart!”

  Who in old age will often part

  From single sleep at the murmur

  Of acerb revels under the hill;

  Whose children couple as the earth crumbles

  In vanity forever going down

  A sunlit road, for his love was strongest

  Who never loved them at all, and his notes

  Most civil, laughing not to return.

  Answering a Question in the Mountains

  I

  I went into the mountains to interest myself

  In the fabulous dinners of hosts distant and demure.

  The foxes followed with endless lights.

  Some day I am to build the wall

  Of the box in which all angles are shown.

  I shall bounce like a ball.

  The towers of justice are waving

  To describe the angles we describe.

  Oh we have been so far

  To instruct the birds in our cold ways.

  Near me I heard a sound,

  The line of a match struck in care.

  It is late to be late.

  II

  Let us ascend the hearts in our hearts.

  Let us ascend trees in our heads,

  The dull heads of trees.

  It is pain in the hand of the ungodly

  To witness all the sentries,

  The perfumed toque of dawn,

  The hysteric evening with empty hands.

  The snow creeps by; many light years pass.

  We see for the first time.

  We shall see for the first time.

  We have seen for the first time.

  The snow creeps by; many light years pass.

  III

  I cannot agree or seek

  Since I departed in the laugh of diamonds

  The hosts of my young days.

  A Pastoral

  Perhaps no vice endears me to the showboat,

  Whose license permeates our deep south.

  The shows are simple, not yet easy, with handsome

  And toy horns trying tried and true melodies.

  Silently, that vice might speak from the shade:

  “Your capers have misdirected all your animals.”

  But, hating and laughing, risen with animals,

  Who is denied admission to the showboat?

  Nevertheless, because of tomorrow’s shade

  The lad intends to file with the green deep south.

  His ankles seek the temple melodies.

  His mischief stirs the rocks and keeps them handsome.

  Tomorrow, finding him less handsome,

  They might side with the foreseeing of animals.

  From the corral the melodies

  Would start, teaching the showboat

  (Thick is the tambour, oversold the deep south)

  Which flowers to press back into the shade.

  My affairs wrapped in shade,

  Myself shall mobilize that handsome

  Energetic enemy of the deep south.

  Lately worms have pestered the animals.

  Alarmed at our actions, a glittering showboat

  Fled from the glade of supposed melodies.

  And no more in our society living melodies

  Break forth under the little or no shade.

  The days are guarded. A miserable showboat

  Plies back and forth between the handsome

  Rocks, unwatched by animals

  Whose glistening breath wakens forgetfulness of the deep south.

  Truly the lesson of the deep south

  Is how to avoid lingering beyond melodies

  That cleave to the heart before it learns what animals

  Strangers are. Knowing shade

  Is their apology, let us never excuse handsome

  Terror, the crook’d finger of a disappearing showboat.

  The psalmist thought the deep south a wonderful showboat

  And to the animals he met in the shade

  Said, “You are my melodies, and you are handsome.”

  Le livre est sur la table

  I

  All beauty, resonance, integrity,

  Exist by deprivation or logic

  Of strange position. This being so,

  We can only imagine a world in which a woman

  Walks and wears her hair and knows

  All that she does not know. Yet we know

  What her breasts are. And we give fullness

  To the dream. The table supports the book,

  The plume leaps in the hand. But what

  Dismal scene is this? the old man pouting

  At a black cloud, the woman gone

  Into the house, from which the wailing starts?

  About the Author

  John Ashbery was born in 1927 in Rochester, New York, and grew up on a farm near Lake Ontario. He studied English at Harvard and at Columbia, and along with his friends Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch, he became a leading voice in what came to be called the New York School of poets. Ashbery’s poetry collection Some Trees was selected by W. H. Auden as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize in 1955—the first of over twenty-five critically admired works Ashbery has published in a career spanning more than six decades. His book Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award, and since then Ashbery has been the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a National Humanities Medal, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and a Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other honors.

  For years, Ashbery taught creative writing at Brooklyn College and Bard College in New York, working with students and codirecting MFA programs while continuing to write and publish award-winning collections of poetry—all marked by his signature philosophical wit, ardent honesty, and polyphonic explorations of modern language. His most recent book of poems is Quick Question, published in 2012. He lives in New York.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  Copyright © 1997 by John Ashbery

  Cover design by Mimi Bark

  978-1-4804-5946-5

  This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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