Large Red Man Reading

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There were ghosts that returned to earth to hear his phrases,

As he sat there reading, aloud, the great blue tabulae.

They were those from the wilderness of stars that had expected more.

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There were those that returned to hear him read from the poem of life,

Of the pans above the stove, the pots on the table, the tulips among them.

They were those that would have wept to step barefoot into reality,

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That would have wept and been happy, have shivered in the frost

And cried out to feel it again, have run fingers over leaves

And against the most coiled thorn, have seized on what was ugly

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And laughed, as he sat there reading, from out of the purple tabulae,

The outlines of being and its expressings, the syllables of its law:

Poesis, poesis, the literal characters, the vatic lines,

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Which in those ears and in those thin, those spended hearts,

Took on color, took on shape and the size of things as they are

And spoke the feeling for them, which was what they had lacked.

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~  Wallace Stevens

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the creations of sound

If the poetry of X was music,

So that it came to him of its own,

Without understanding, out of the wall

Or in the ceiling, in sounds not chosen,

Or chosen quickly, in a freedom

That was their element, we should not know

That X is an obstruction, a man

Too exactly himself, and that there are words

Better without an author, without a poet,

Or having a separate author, a different poet,

An accretion from ourselves, intelligent

Beyond intelligence, an artificial man

At a distance, a secondary expositor,

A being of sound, whom one does not approach

Through any exaggeration.  From him, we collect.

Tell X that speech is not dirty silence

Clarified.  It is silence made still dirtier.

It is more than an imitation for the ear.

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He lacks this venerable complication.

His poems are not of the second part of life.

They do not make the visible a little hard

To see nor, reverberating, eked out the mind

On peculiar horns, themselves eked out

By the spontaneous particulars of sound.

We do not say ourselves like that in poems.

We say ourselves in syllables that rise

From the floor, rising in speech we do not speak.

~ Wallace Stevens

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On the Road Home

It was when I said,

"There is no such thing as the truth,"

That the grapes seemed fatter.

The fox ran out of his hole.

You...You said,

"There are many truths,

But they are not parts of a truth."

Then the tree, at night, began to change,

Smoking through green and smoking blue.

We were two figures in a wood.

We said we stood alone.

It was when I said.

"Words are not forms of a single word.

In the sum of the parts, there are only the parts.

The world must be measured by the eye";

It was when you said,

"The idols have seen lots of poverty,

Snakes and gold and lice,

But not the truth";

It was at that time, that the silence was largest

And longest, the night was roundest,

The fragrance of the autumn warmest,

Closest and strongest.

~ Wallace Stevens

The Snow Man

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One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

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And have been cold a long time

To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

The spruces rough in the distant glitter

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Of the January sun ; and not to think

Of any misery in the sound of the wind,

In the sound of a few leaves,

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Which is the sound of the land

Full of the same wind

That is blowing in the same bare place

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For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

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~ Wallace Stevens

The night knows nothing of the chants of night

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The night knows nothing of the chants of night.

It is what it is as I am what I am:

And in perceiving this I best perceive myself

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And you. Only we two may interchange

Each in the other what each has to give.

Only we two are one, not you and night,

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Nor night and I, but you and I, alone,

So much alone, so deeply by ourselves,

So far beyond the casual solitudes,

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That night is only the background of our selves,

Supremely true each to its separate self,

In the pale light that each upon the other throws.

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~ Wallace Stevens

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