John Ashbery Takes A Walk

Le livre est sur la table
One
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 housе, from which the wailing starts?

Two
The young man places a bird-housе against the blue sea
He walks away and it remains
Now other men appear, but they live in boxes
The sea protects them like a wall
The gods worship a line-drawing of a woman
In the shadow of the sea which goes on writing
Are there collisions, communications on the shore
Or did all secrets vanish when the woman left?
Is the bird mentioned in the waves' minutes, or did the land advance?

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