JOHN ASHBERY

Some Trees

These are amazing: each
Joining a neighbour, 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 defence.

At North Farm

Somewhere someone is travelling furiously toward you
At incredible speed, travelling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes,
But will he know where to find you,
give you the thing he has for you?

Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters,
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. It is enough
That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him sometimes,
Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?