SOME TREES

--John Ashbery

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.

Cheerios

BY BILLY COLLINS

One bright morning in a restaurant in Chicago

as I waited for my eggs and toast,

I opened the Tribune only to discover

that I was the same age as Cheerios.

Indeed, I was a few months older than Cheerios

for today, the newspaper announced,

was the seventieth birthday of Cheerios

whereas mine had occurred earlier in the year.

Already I could hear them whispering

behind my stooped and threadbare back,

Why that dude’s older than Cheerios

the way they used to say

Why that’s as old as the hills, 

only the hills are much older than Cheerios

or any American breakfast cereal,

and more noble and enduring are the hills,

I surmised as a bar of sunlight illuminated my orange juice.

Thanksgiving

Billy Collins

The thing about the huge platter 
of sliced celery, broccoli florets, 
and baby tomatoes you had arranged 
to look like a turkey with its tail fanned out 
was that all our guests were so intimidated 
by the perfection of the design 
no one dared disturb the symmetry 
by removing so much as the nub of a carrot. 

And the other thing about all that 
was that it took only a few minutes 
for the outline of the turkey to disappear 
once the guests were encouraged to dig in, 
so that no one would have guessed 
that this platter of scattered vegetables ever bore 
the slightest resemblance to a turkey 
or any other two- or four-legged animal. 

It reminded me of the sand mandalas 
so carefully designed by Tibetan monks 
and then just as carefully destroyed 
by lines scored across the diameter of the circle, 
the variously colored sand then swept 
into a pile and carried in a vessel 
to the nearest moving water and poured in-- 
a reminder of the impermanence of art and life. 

Only, in the case of the vegetable turkey 
such a reminder was never intended. 
Or if it was, I was too busy slicing up 
even more vivid lessons in impermanence 
to notice.  I mean the real turkey minus its head 
and colorful feathers, and the ham 
minus the pig minus its corkscrew tail 
and minus the snout once happily slathered in mud.

(From The Rain in Portugal, 77-78).

The Ideal

By James Fenton

This is where I came from.
I passed this way.
This should not be shameful
or hard to say.

A self is a self.
It is not a screen.
A person should respect
what he has been.

This is my past
which I shall not discard.
This is the ideal.
This is hard.