Some Trees: Poems

by John Ashbery

Waiting for a chill

  In the chill

  That without a can

  Is painting less clay

  Therapeutic colors of clay.

  We got out into the clay

  As a boy can.

  Yet there’s another kind of clay

  Not arguing clay,

  As time grows

  Not getting larger, but mad clay

  Looked for for clay,

  And grass

  Begun seeming, grass

  Struggling up out of clay

  Into the first chill

  To be quiet and raucous in the chill.

  The chill

  Flows over burning grass.

  Not time grows.

  So odd lights can

  Fall on sinking clay.

  Errors

  Jealousy. Whispered weather reports.

  In the street we found boxes

  Littered with snow, to burn at home.

  What flower tolling on the waters

  You stupefied me. We waxed,

  Carnivores, late and alight

  In the beaded winter. All was ominous, luminous.

  Beyond the bed’s veils the white walls danced

  Some violent compunction. Promises,

  We thought then of your dry portals,

  Bright cornices of eavesdropping palaces,

  You were painfully stitched to hours

  The moon now tears up, coffing at the unrinsed portions.

  And love’s adopted realm. Flees to water,

  The coach dissolving in mists.

  A wish

  Refines the lines around the mouth

  At these ten-year intervals. It fumed

  Clear air of wars. It desired

  Excess of core in all things. From all things sucked

  A glossy denial. But look, pale day:

  We fly hence. To return if sketched

  In the prophet’s silence. Who doubts it is true?

  Illustration

  I

  A novice was sitting on a cornice

  High over the city. Angels

  Combined their prayers with those

  Of the police, begging her to come off it.

  One lady promised to be her friend.

  “I do not want a friend,” she said.

  A mother offered her some nylons

  Stripped from her very legs. Others brought

  Little offerings of fruit and candy,

  The blind man all his flowers. If any

  Could be called successful, these were,

  For that the scene should be a ceremony

  Was what she wanted. “I desire

  Monuments,” she said. “I want to move

  Figuratively, as waves caress

  The thoughtless shore. You people I know

  Will offer me every good thing

  I do not want. But please remember

  I died accepting them.” With that, the wind

  Unpinned her bulky robes, and naked

  As a roc’s egg, she drifted softly downward

  Out of the angels’ tenderness and the minds of men.

  II

  Much that is beautiful must be discarded

  So that we may resemble a taller

  Impression of ourselves. Moths climb in the flame,

  Alas, that wish only to be the flame:

  They do not lessen our stature.

  We twinkle under the weight

  Of indiscretions. But how could we tell

  That of the truth we know, she was

  The somber vestment? For that night, rockets sighed

  Elegantly over the city, and there was feasting:

  There is so much in that moment!

  So many attitudes toward that flame,

  We might have soared from earth, watching her glide

  Aloft, in her peplum of bright leaves.

  But she, of course, was only an effigy

  Of indifference, a miracle

  Not meant for us, as the leaves are not

  Winter’s because it is the end.

  Some Trees

  These are amazing: each

  Joining a neighbor, as though speech

  Were a still performance.

  Arranging by chance

  To meet as far this morning

  From the world as agreeing

  With it, you and I

  Are suddenly what the trees try

  To tell us we are:

  That their merely being there

  Means something; that soon

  We may touch, love, explain.

  And glad not to have invented

  Such comeliness, we are surrounded:

  A silence already filled with noises,

  A canvas on which emerges

  A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.

  Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,

  Our days put on such reticence

  These accents seem their own defense.

  Hotel Dauphin

  It was not something identical with my carnation-world

  But its smallest possession—a hair or a sneeze—

  I wanted. I remember

  Dreaming on tan plush the wrong dreams

  Of asking fortunes, now lost

  In what snows? Is there anything

  We dare credit? And we get along.

  The soul resumes its teachings. Winter boats

  Are visible in the harbor. A child writes

  “La pluie.” All noise is engendered

  As we sit listening. I lose myself

  In others’ dreams.

  Why no vacation from these fortunes, from the white hair

  Of the old? These dreams of tennis?

  Fortunately, the snow, cutting like a knife,

  Protects too itself from us.

  Not so with this rouge I send to you

  At old Christmas. Here the mysteries

  And the color of holly are embezzled—

  Poor form, poor watchman for my holidays,

  My days of name-calling and blood-letting.

  Do not fear the exasperation of death

  (Whichever way I go is solitary)

  Or the candles blown out by your passing.

  It breathes a proper farewell, the panic

  Under sleep like grave under stone,

  Warning of sad renewals of the spirit.

  In cheap gardens, fortunes. Or we might never depart.

  The Painter

  Sitting between the sea and the buildings

  He enjoyed painting the sea’s portrait.

  But just as children imagine a prayer

  Is merely silence, he expected his subject

  To rush up the sand, and, seizing a brush,

  Plaster its own portrait on the canvas.

  So there was never any paint on his canvas

  Until the people who lived in the buildings

  Put him to work: “Try using the brush

  As a means to an end. Select, for a portrait,

  Something less angry and large, and more subject

  To a painter’s moods, or, perhaps, to a prayer.”

  How could he explain to them his prayer

  That nature, not art, might usurp the canvas?

  He chose his wife for a new subject,

  Making her vast, like ruined buildings,

  As if, forgetting itself, the portrait

  Had expressed itself without a brush.

  Slightly encouraged, he dipped his brush

  In the sea, murmuring a heartfelt prayer:

  “My soul, when I paint this next portrait

  Let it be you who wrecks the canvas.”

  The news spread like wildfire through the buildings:

  He had gone back to the sea for his subject.

  Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!

  Too exhausted even to lift his brush,

  He provoked some artists leaning from the buildings

  To malicious mirth: “We haven’t a pray
er

  Now, of putting ourselves on canvas,

  Or getting the sea to sit for a portrait!”

  Others declared it a self-portrait.

  Finally all indications of a subject

  Began to fade, leaving the canvas

  Perfectly white. He put down the brush.

  At once a howl, that was also a prayer,

  Arose from the overcrowded buildings.

  They tossed him, the portrait, from the tallest of the buildings;

  And the sea devoured the canvas and the brush

  As though his subject had decided to remain a prayer.

  And You Know

  The girls, protected by gold wire from the gaze

  Of the onrushing students, live in an atmosphere of vacuum

  In the old schoolhouse covered with nasturtiums.

  At night, comets, shooting stars, twirling planets,

  Suns, bits of illuminated pumice, and spooks hang over the old place;

  The atmosphere is breathless. Some find the summer light

  Nauseous and damp, but there are those

  Who are charmed by it, going out into the morning.

  We must rest here, for this is where the teacher comes.

  On his desk stands a vase of tears.

  A quiet feeling pervades the playroom. His voice clears

  Through the interminable afternoon: “I was a child once

  Under the spangled sun. Now I do what must be done.

  I teach reading and writing and flaming arithmetic. Those

  In my home come to me anxiously at night, asking how it goes.

  My door is always open. I never lie, and the great heat warms me.”

  His door is always open, the fond schoolmaster!

  We ought to imitate him in our lives,

  For as a man lives, he dies. To pass away

  In the afternoon, on the vast vapid bank

  You think is coming to crown you with hollyhocks and lilacs, or in gold at the opera,

  Requires that one shall have lived so much! And not merely

  Asking questions and giving answers, but grandly sitting,

  Like a great rock, through many years.

  It is the erratic path of time we trace

  On the globe, with moist fingertip, and surely, the globe stops;

  We are pointing to England, to Africa, to Nigeria;

  And we shall visit these places, you and I, and other places,

  Including heavenly Naples, queen of the sea, where I shall be king and you will be queen,

  And all the places around Naples.

  So the good old teacher is right, to stop with his finger on Naples, gazing out into the mild December afternoon

  As his star pupil enters the classroom in that elaborate black and yellow creation.

  He is thinking of her flounces, and is caught in them as if they were made of iron, they will crush him to death!

  Goodbye, old teacher, we must travel on, not to a better land, perhaps,

  But to the England of the sonnets, Paris, Colombia, and Switzerland

  And all the places with names, that we wish to visit—

  Strasbourg, Albania,

  The coast of Holland, Madrid, Singapore, Naples, Salonika, Liberia, and Turkey.

  So we leave you behind with her of the black and yellow flounces.

  You were always a good friend, but a special one.

  Now as we brush through the clinging leaves we seem to hear you crying;

  You want us to come back, but it is too late to come back, isn’t it?

  It is too late to go to the places with the names (what were they, anyway? just names).

  It is too late to go anywhere but to the nearest star, that one, that hangs just over the hill, beckoning

  Like a hand of which the arm is not visible. Goodbye, Father! Goodbye, pupils. Goodbye, my master and my dame.

  We fly to the nearest star, whether it be red like a furnace, or yellow,

  And we carry your lessons in our hearts (the lessons and our hearts are the same)

  Out of the humid classroom, into the forever. Goodbye, Old Dog Tray.

  And so they have left us feeling tired and old.

  They never cared for school anyway.

  And they have left us with the things pinned on the bulletin board,

  And the night, the endless, muggy night that is invading our school.

  He

  He cuts down the lakes so they appear straight

  He smiles at his feet in their tired mules.

  He turns up the music much louder.

  He takes down the vaseline from the pantry shelf.

  He is the capricious smile behind the colored bottles.

  He eats not lest the poor want some.

  He breathes of attitudes the piney altitudes.

  He indeed is the White Cliffs of Dover.

  He knows that his neck is frozen.

  He snorts in the vale of dim wolves.

  He writes to say, “If ever you visit this island,

  He’ll grow you back to your childhood.

  “He is the liar behind the hedge

  He grew one morning out of candor.

  He is his own consolation prize.

  He has had his eye on you from the beginning.”

  He hears the weak cut down with a smile.

  He waltzes tragically on the spitting housetops.

  He is never near. What you need

  He cancels with the air of one making a salad.

  He is always the last to know.

  He is strength you once said was your bonnet.

  He has appeared in “Carmen.”

  He is after us. If you decide

  He is important, it will get you nowhere.

  He is the source of much bitter reflection.

  He used to be pretty for a rat.

  He is now over-proud of his Etruscan appearance.

  He walks in his sleep into your life.

  He is worth knowing only for the children

  He has reared as savages in Utah.

  He helps his mother take in the clothes-line.

  He is unforgettable as a shooting star.

  He is known as “Liverlips.”

  He will tell you he has had a bad time of it.

  He will try to pretend his pressagent is a temptress.

  He looks terrible on the stairs.

  He cuts himself on what he eats.

  He was last seen flying to New York.

  He was handing out cards which read:

  “He wears a question in his left eye.

  He dislikes the police but will associate with them.

  He will demand something not on the menu.

  He is invisible to the eyes of beauty and culture.

  “He prevented the murder of Mistinguett in Mexico.

  He has a knack for abortions. If you see

  He is following you, forget him immediately:

  He is dangerous even though asleep and unarmed.”

  Meditations of a Parrot

  Oh the rocks and the thimble

  The oasis and the bed

  Oh the jacket and the roses.

  All sweetly stood up the sea to me

  Like blue cornflakes in a white bowl.

  The girl said, “Watch this.”

  I come from Spain, I said.

  I was purchased at a fair.

  She said, “None of us know.

  “There was a house once

  Of dazzling canopies

  And halls like a keyboard.

  “These the waves tore in pieces.”

  (His old wound—

  And all day: Robin Hood! Robin Hood!)

  Sonnet

  The barber at his chair

  Clips me. He does as he goes.

  He clips the hairs outside the nose.

  Too many preparations, nose!

  I see the raincoat this Saturday.

  A building is against the sky—

  The result is
more sky.

  Something gathers in painfully.

  To be the razor—how would you like to be

  The razor, blue with ire,

  That presses me? This is the wrong way.

  The canoe speeds toward a waterfall.

  Something, prince, in our backward manners—

  You guessed the reason for the storm.

  A Long Novel

  What will his crimes become, now that her hands

  Have gone to sleep? He gathers deeds

  In the pure air, the agent

  Of their factual excesses. He laughs as she inhales.

  If it could have ended before

  It began—the sorrow, the snow

  Dropping, dropping its fine regrets.

  The myrtle dries about his lavish brow.

  He stands quieter than the day, a breath

  In which all evils are one.

  He is the purest air. But her patience,

  The imperative Become, trembles

  Where hands have been before. In the foul air

  Each snowflake seems a Piranesi

  Dropping in the past; his words are heavy

  With their final meaning. Milady! Mimosa! So the end

  Was the same: the discharge of spittle

  Into frozen air. Except that, in a new

  Humorous landscape, without music,

  Written by music, he knew he was a saint,

  While she touched all goodness

  As golden hair, knowing its goodness

  Impossible, and waking and waking

  As it grew in the eyes of the beloved.

  The Way They Took

  The green bars on you grew soberer

  As I petted the lock, a crank

  In my specially built shoes.

  We hedged about leisure, feeling, walking

  That day, that night. The day

  Came up. The heads borne in peach vessels

  Out of asking that afternoon droned.

  You saw the look of some other people,

  Huge husks of chattering boys

  And girls unfathomable in lovely dresses

  And remorseful and on the edge of darkness.

  No firmness in that safe smile ebbing.

  Tinkling sadness. The sun pissed on a rock.

  That is how I came nearer

  To what was on my shoulder. One day you were lunching

  With a friend’s mother; I thought how plebeian all this testimony,

  That you might care to crave that, somehow

  Before I would decide. Just think,

  But I know now how romantic, how they whispered