Some Trees

by John Ashbery

Overview

John Ashbery’s first published book of poems, handpicked from the slush pile by none other than W. H. Auden

Ashbery’s Some Trees narrowly beat out a manuscript by fellow New York poet Frank O’Hara to win the renowned Yale Series of Younger Poets prize in 1955—after the book had been rejected in an early screening round. Competition judge W. H. Auden was perhaps the first to note, in his original preface to Some Trees, the meditative polyphony that decades of readers have come to identify as Ashbery’s unique style: “If he is to be true to nature in this world, he must accept strange juxtapositions of imagery, singular associations of ideas.”
 
But not all is strange and associative here: Some Trees includes “The Instruction Manual,” one of Ashbery’s most conversational and perhaps most quoted poems, as well as a number of poems that display his casually masterful handling of such traditional forms as the sonnet, the pantoum, the Italian canzone, and even, with “The Painter,” the odd tricky sestina. Some Trees, an essential collection for Ashbery scholars and newbies alike, introduced one of postwar America’s most enduring and provocative poetic voices, by turns conversational, discordant, haunting, and wise. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781480459168
Publisher:	Open Road Media
Publication date:	09/09/2014
Series:	Yale Series of Younger Poets
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	87
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

John Ashbery was born in 1927 in Rochester, New York, and grew up on a farm near Lake Ontario. He authored more than thirty books of poetry, fiction, drama, and criticism, his work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages, and he won numerous American literary awards for his poetry, including a MacArthur Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and a National Humanities Medal. His book Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. For many years, Ashbery taught graduate and undergraduate poetry courses at Brooklyn College and Bard College, and his most recent book of poems is Quick Question, published in 2012.
John Ashbery was born in 1927 in Rochester, New York, and grew up on a farm near Lake Ontario. He has authored more than thirty books of poetry, fiction, drama, and criticism, his work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages, and he has won numerous American literary awards for his poetry, including a MacArthur Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and a National Humanities Medal. His book Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award. For many years, Ashbery taught graduate and undergraduate poetry courses at Brooklyn College and Bard College, and his most recent book of poems is Quick Question, published in 2012. He lives in New York.

Read an Excerpt

Some Trees

Poems

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By John Ashbery

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

Copyright © 1997 John Ashbery
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4804-5916-8

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CHAPTER 1

    Two Scenes

    I

    We see us as we truly behave:
    From every corner comes a distinctive offering.
    The train comes bearing joy;
    The sparks it strikes illuminate the table.
    Destiny guides the water-pilot, and it is destiny.
    For long we hadn't heard so much news, such noise.
    The day was warm and pleasant.
    "We see you in your hair,
    Air resting around the tips of mountains."

    II

    A fine rain anoints the canal machinery.
    This is perhaps a day of general honesty
    Without example in the world's history
    Though the fumes are not of a singular authority
    And indeed are dry as poverty.

    Terrific units are on an old man
    In the blue shadow of some paint cans
    As laughing cadets say, "In the evening
    Everything has a schedule, if you can find out what it is."


    Popular Songs

    He continued to consult her for her beauty
    (The host gone to a longing grave).
    The story then resumed in day coaches
    Both bravely eyed the finer dust on the blue. That summer
    ("The worst ever") she stayed in the car with the cur.
    That was something between her legs.
    Alton had been getting letters from his mother
    About the payments—half the flood
    Over and what about the net rest of the year?
    Who cares? Anyway (you know how thirsty they were)
    The extra worry began it—on the
    Blue blue mountain—she never set foot
    And then and there. Meanwhile the host
    Mourned her quiet tenure. They all stayed chatting.
    No one did much about eating.
    The tears came and stopped, came and stopped, until
    Becoming the guano-lightened summer night landscape,
    All one glow, one mild laugh lasting ages.
    Some precision, he fumed into his soup.

    You laugh. There is no peace in the fountain.
    The footmen smile and shift. The mountain
    Rises nightly to disappointed stands
    Dining in "The Gardens of the Moon."
    There is no way to prevent this
    Or the expectation of disappointment.
    All are aware, some carry a secret
    Better, of hands emulating deeds
    Of days untrustworthy. But these may decide.
    The face extended its sorrowing light
    Far out over them. And now silent as a group
    The actors prepare their first decline.


    Eclogue

    Cuddie: Slowly all your secret is had
    In the empty day. People and sticks go down to the water.
    How can we be so silent? Only shivers
    Are bred in this land of whistling goats.

    Colin: Father, I have long dreamed your whitened
    Face and sides to accost me in dull play.
    If you in your bush indeed know her
    Where shall my heart's vagrant tides place her?

    Cuddie: A wish is induced by a sudden change
    In the wind's decay. Shall we to the water's edge,
    O prince? The peons rant in a light fume.
    Madness will gaze at its reflection.

    Colin: What is this pain come near me?
    Now I thought my heart would burst,
    And there, spiked like some cadenza's head,
    A tiny crippled heart was born.

    Cuddie: I tell you good will imitate this.
    Now we must dip in raw water
    These few thoughts and fleshy members.
    So evil may refresh our days.

    Colin: She has descended part way!
    Now father cut me down with tears.
    Plant me far in my mother's image
    To do cold work of books and stones.

    Cuddie: I need not raise my hand

    Colin: She burns the flying peoples

    Cuddie: To hear its old advice

    Colin: And spears my heart's two beasts

    Cuddie: Or cover with its mauves.

    Colin: And I depart unhurt.


    The Instruction Manual

    As I sit looking out of a window of the building
    I wish I did not have to write the instruction manual on the uses of a new metal.
    I look down into the street and see people, each walking with an inner peace,
    And envy them—they are so far away from me!
    Not one of them has to worry about getting out this manual on schedule.
    And, as my way is, I begin to dream, resting my elbows on the desk and leaning out
    of the window a little,
    Of dim Guadalajara! City of rose-colored flowers!
    City I wanted most to see, and most did not see, in Mexico!
    But I fancy I see, under the press of having to write the instruction manual,
    Your public square, city, with its elaborate little bandstand!
    The band is playing Scheherazade by Rimsky-Korsakov.
    Around stand the flower girls, handing out rose-and lemon-colored flowers,
    Each attractive in her rose-and-blue striped dress (Oh! such shades of rose and blue),
    And nearby is the little white booth where women in green serve you green and
    yellow fruit.
    The couples are parading; everyone is in a holiday mood.
    First, leading the parade, is a dapper fellow
    Clothed in deep blue. On his head sits a white hat
    And he wears a mustache, which has been trimmed for the occasion.
    His dear one, his wife, is young and pretty; her shawl is rose, pink, and white.
    Her slippers are patent leather, in the American fashion,
    And she carries a fan, for she is modest, and does not want the crowd to see her face
    too often.
    But everybody is so busy with his wife or loved one
    I doubt they would notice the mustachioed man's wife.
    Here come the boys! They are skipping and throwing little things on the sidewalk
    Which is made of gray tile. One of them, a little older, has a toothpick in his teeth.
    He is silenter than the rest, and affects not to notice the pretty young girls in white.
    But his friends notice them, and shout their jeers at the laughing girls.
    Yet soon all this will cease, with the deepening of their years,
    And love bring each to the parade grounds for another reason.
    But I have lost sight of the young fellow with the toothpick.
    Wait—there he is—on the other side of the bandstand,
    Secluded from his friends, in earnest talk with a young girl
    Of fourteen or fifteen. I try to hear what they are saying
    But it seems they are just mumbling something—shy words of love, probably.
    She is slightly taller than he, and looks quietly down into his sincere eyes.
    She is wearing white. The breeze ruffles her long fine black hair against her olive cheek.
    Obviously she is in love. The boy, the young boy with the toothpick, he is in love too;
    His eyes show it. Turning from this couple,
    I see there is an intermission in the concert.
    The paraders are resting and sipping drinks through straws
    (The drinks are dispensed from a large glass crock by a lady in dark blue),
    And the musicians mingle among them, in their creamy white uniforms, and talk
    About the weather, perhaps, or how their kids are doing at school.

    Let us take this opportunity to tiptoe into one of the side streets.
    Here you may see one of those white houses with green trim
    That are so popular here. Look—I told you!
    It is cool and dim inside, but the patio is sunny.
    An old woman in gray sits there, fanning herself with a palm leaf fan.
    She welcomes us to her patio, and offers us a cooling drink.
    "My son is in Mexico City," she says. "He would welcome you too
    If he were here. But his job is with a bank there.
    Look, here is a photograph of him."
    And a dark-skinned lad with pearly teeth grins out at us from the worn leather frame.
    We thank her for her hospitality, for it is getting late
    And we must catch a view of the city, before we leave, from a good high place.
    That church tower will do—the faded pink one, there against the fierce blue of the sky.
    Slowly we enter.
    The caretaker, an old man dressed in brown and gray, asks us how long we have been in
    the city, and how we like it here.
    His daughter is scrubbing the steps—she nods to us as we pass into the tower.
    Soon we have reached the top, and the whole network of the city extends before us.
    There is the rich quarter, with its houses of pink and white, and its crumbling, leafy
    terraces.
    There is the poorer quarter, its homes a deep blue.
    There is the market, where men are selling hats and swatting flies
    And there is the public library, painted several shades of pale green and beige.
    Look! There is the square we just came from, with the promenaders.
    There are fewer of them, now that the heat of the day has increased,
    But the young boy and girl still lurk in the shadows of the bandstand.
    And there is the home of the little old lady—
    She is still sitting in the patio, fanning herself.
    How limited, but how complete withal, has been our experience of Guadalajara!
    We have seen young love, married love, and the love of an aged mother for her son.
    We have heard the music, tasted the drinks, and looked at colored houses.
    What more is there to do, except stay? And that we cannot do.
    And as a last breeze freshens the top of the weathered old tower, I turn my gaze
    Back to the instruction manual which has made me dream of Guadalajara.


    The Grapevine

    Of who we and all they are
    You all now know. But you know
    After they began to find us out we grew
    Before they died thinking us the causes

    Of their acts. Now we'll not know
    The truth of some still at the piano, though
    They often date from us, causing
    These changes we think we are. We don't care

    Though, so tall up there
    In young air. But things get darker as we move
    To ask them: Whom must we get to know
    To die, so you live and we know?


    A Boy

    I'll do what the raids suggest,
    Dad, and that other livid window,
    But the tide pushes an awful lot of monsters
    And I think it's my true fate.

    It had been raining but
    It had not been raining.

    No one could begin to mop up this particular mess.
    Thunder lay down in the heart.
    "My child, I love any vast electrical disturbance."
    Disturbance! Could the old man, face in the rainweed,

    Ask more smuttily? By night it charged over plains,
    Driven from Dallas and Oregon, always whither,
    Why not now? The boy seemed to have fallen
    From shelf to shelf of someone's rage.

    That night it rained on the boxcars, explaining
    The thought of the pensive cabbage roses near the boxcars.
    My boy. Isn't there something I asked you once?
    What happened? It's also farther to the corner
    Aboard the maple furniture. He
    Couldn't lie. He'd tell 'em by their syntax.

    But listen now in the flood.
    They're throwing up behind the lines.
    Dry fields of lightning rise to receive
    The observer, the mincing flag. An unendurable age.


    Glazunoviana

    The man with the red hat
    And the polar bear, is he here too?
    The window giving on shade,
    Is that here too?
    And all the little helps,
    My initials in the sky,
    The hay of an arctic summer night?

    The bear
    Drops dead in sight of the window.
    Lovely tribes have just moved to the north.
    In the flickering evening the martins grow denser.
    Rivers of wings surround us and vast tribulation.


    The Hero

    Whose face is this
    stiff against the blue trees,

    Lifted to the future
    Because there is no end?

    But that has faded
    Like flowers, like the first days

    Of good conduct. Visit
    The strong man. Pinch him—

    There is no end to his
    Dislike, the accurate one.


    Poem

    While we were walking under the top
    The road so strangely lit by lamps
    And I wanting only peace
    From the tradesmen who tried cutting my hair
    Under their lips a white word is waiting
    Hanging from a cliff like the sky

    It is because of the sky
    We ever reached the top
    On that day of waiting
    For the hand and the lamps
    I moisten my crystal hair
    Never so calmly as when at peace

    With the broken sky of peace
    Peace means it to the sky
    Let down your hair
    Through peaceful air the top
    Of ruins because what are lamps
    When night is waiting

    A room of people waiting
    To die in peace
    Then strike the procession of lamps
    They brought more than sky
    Lungs back to the top
    Means to doom your hair

    Those bright pads of hair
    Before the sea held back waiting
    And you cannot speak to the top
    It moves toward peace
    And know the day of sky
    Only by falling lamps

    Beyond the desert lamps
    Mount enslaved crystal mountains of hair
    Into the day of sky
    Silence is waiting
    For anything peace
    And you find the top

    The top is lamps
    Peace to the fragrant hair
    Waiting for a tropical sky


    Album Leaf

    The other marigolds and the cloths
    Are crimes invented for history.
    What can we achieve, aspiring?
    And what, aspiring, can we achieve?

    What can the rain that fell
    All day on the grounds
    And on the bingo tables?
    Even though it is clearing,

    The statue turned to a sweeter light,
    The nearest patrons are black.
    Then there is a storm of receipts: night,
    Sand the bowl did not let fall.

    The other marigolds are scattered like dust.
    Sweet peas in dark gardens
    Squirt false melancholy over history.
    If a bug fell from so high, would it land?


    The Picture of Little J. A.
    in a Prospect of Flowers

    He was spoilt from childhood by the future,
    which he mastered rather early and
    apparently without great difficulty.

    Boris Pasternak

    I

    Darkness falls like a wet sponge
    And Dick gives Genevieve a swift punch
    In the pajamas. "Aroint thee, witch."
    Her tongue from previous ecstasy
    Releases thoughts like little hats.

    "He clap'd me first during the eclipse.
    Afterwards I noted his manner
    Much altered. But he sending
    At that time certain handsome jewels
    I durst not seem to take offence."

    In a far recess of summer
    Monks are playing soccer.

    II

    So far is goodness a mere memory
    Or naming of recent scenes of badness
    That even these lives, children,
    You may pass through to be blessed,
    So fair does each invent his virtue.

    And coming from a white world, music
    Will sparkle at the lips of many who are
    Beloved. Then these, as dirty handmaidens
    To some transparent witch, will dream
    Of a white hero's subtle wooing,
    And time shall force a gift on each.

    That beggar to whom you gave no cent
    Striped the night with his strange descant.

    III

    Yet I cannot escape the picture
    Of my small self in that bank of flowers:
    My head among the blazing phlox
    Seemed a pale and gigantic fungus.
    I had a hard stare, accepting

    Everything, taking nothing,
    As though the rolled-up future might stink
    As loud as stood the sick moment
    The shutter clicked. Though I was wrong,
    Still, as the loveliest feelings

    Must soon find words, and these, yes,
    Displace them, so I am not wrong
    In calling this comic version of myself
    The true one. For as change is horror,
    Virtue is really stubbornness

    And only in the light of lost words
    Can we imagine our rewards.


    Pantoum

    Eyes shining without mystery,
    Footprints eager for the past
    Through the vague snow of many clay pipes,
    And what is in store?

    Footprints eager for the past,
    The usual obtuse blanket.
    And what is in store
    For those dearest to the king?

    The usual obtuse blanket
    Of legless regrets and amplifications
    For those dearest to the king.
    Yes, sirs, connoisseurs of oblivion,

    Of legless regrets and amplifications,
    That is why a watchdog is shy.
    Yes, sirs, connoisseurs of oblivion,
    These days are short, brittle; there is only one night.

    That is why a watchdog is shy,
    Why the court, trapped in a silver storm, is dying.
    These days are short, brittle; there is only one night
    And that soon gotten over.

    Why, the court, trapped in a silver storm, is dying!
    Some blunt pretense to safety we have
    And that soon gotten over
    For they must have motion.

    Some blunt pretense to safety we have:
    Eyes shining without mystery
    For they must have motion
    Through the vague snow of many clay pipes.


    Grand Abacus

    Perhaps this valley too leads into the head of long-ago days.
    What, if not its commercial and etiolated visage, could break through the meadow
    wires?
    It placed a chair in the meadow and then went far away.
    People come to visit in summer, they do not think about the head.
    Soldiers come down to see the head. The stick hides from them.
    The heavens say, "Here I am, boys and girls!"
    The stick tries to hide in the noise. The leaves, happy, drift over the dusty meadow.
    "I'd like to see it," someone said about the head, which has stopped pretending to be
    a town.
    Look! A ghastly change has come over it. The ears fall off—they are laughing
    people.
    The skin is perhaps children, they say, "We children," and are vague near the sea.
    The eyes—
    Wait! What large raindrops! The eyes—
    Wait, can't you see them pattering, in the meadow, like a dog?
    The eyes are all glorious! And now the river comes to sweep away the last of us.
    Who knew it, at the beginning of the day?
    It is best to travel like a comet, with the others, though one does not see them.
    How far that bridle flashed! "Hurry up, children!" The birds fly back, they say, "We were
    lying,
    We do not want to fly away." But it is already too late. The children have vanished.


    The Mythological Poet

    I

    The music brought us what it seemed
    We had long desired, but in a form
    So rarefied there was no emptiness
    Of sensation, as if pleasure
    Might persist, like a dear friend
    Walking toward one in a dream.
    It was the toothless murmuring
    Of ancient willows, who kept their trouble
    In a stage of music. Without tumult
    Snow-capped mountains and heart-shaped
    Cathedral windows were contained
    There, until only infinity
    Remained of beauty. Then lighter than the air
    We rose and packed the picnic basket.

    But there is beside us, they said,
    Whom we do not sustain, the world
    Of things, that rages like a virgin
    Next to our silken thoughts. It can
    Be touched, they said. It cannot harm.

    But suddenly their green sides
    Foundered, as if the virgin beat
    Their airy trellis from within.
    Over her furious sighs, a new
    Music, innocent and monstrous
    As the ocean's bright display of teeth
    Fell on the jousting willows. We
    Are sick, they said. It is a warning
    We were not meant to understand.

    II

    The mythological poet, his face
    Fabulous and fastidious, accepts
    Beauty before it arrives. The heavenly
    Moment in the heaviness of arrival
    Deplores him. He is merely
    An ornament, a kind of lewd
    Cloud placed on the horizon.

    Close to the zoo, acquiescing
    To dust, candy, perverts; inserted in
    The panting forest, or openly
    Walking in the great and sullen square
    He has eloped with all music
    And does not care. For isn't there,
    He says, a final diversion, greater
    Because it can be given, a gift
    Too simple even to be despised?

    And oh beside the roaring
    Centurion of the lion's hunger
    Might not child and pervert
    Join hands, in the instant
    Of their interest, in the shadow
    Of a million boats; their hunger
    From loss grown merely a gesture?

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Some Trees by John Ashbery. Copyright © 1997 John Ashbery. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Publisher's Note,
Two Scenes,
Popular Songs,
Eclogue,
The Instruction Manual,
The Grapevine,
A Boy,
Glazunoviana,
The Hero,
Poem,
Album Leaf,
The Picture of Little J. A. in a Prospect of Flowers,
Pantoum,
Grand Abacus,
The Mythological Poet,
Sonnet,
Chaos,
The Orioles,
The Young Son,
The Thinnest Shadow,
Canzone,
Errors,
Illustration,
Some Trees,
Hotel Dauphin,
The Painter,
And You Know,
He,
Meditations of a Parrot,
Sonnet,
A Long Novel,
The Way They Took,
The Pied Piper,
Answering a Question in the Mountains,
A Pastoral,
Le livre est sur la table,
About the Author,