Thirteen Ways of Visiting Hartford

In honor of the new Wallace Stevens Walking Tour

I

The smell of New England
Like dusty books on crooked shelves,
The scent of home - stale, cloying,
Promising the mind some filial and final nothing
As it digs for deeper fruit in stony ground.

II

Downtown at night,
The gargoyles in stone are electrified,
While the white moon illumes a man in harmonica solitude,
Affronted past and desperate present
From a film noir hotel room:
Neon bar sign flashing through sheer curtains,
Gilded bedspread, lonely sofa, arched doors like quizzical brows.
On the wall,
A simple platter of pears and apples
Turned a la Cezanne
To mangos and pomegranate,
The roses in the vase now orange palms.

III

The trains he used to take to New Haven and New York
Have grown black flowers, acquired the greater beauty
Of flaked paint, rusted steel, glowing bolts.
They run on the same solemn slabs from old quarries overgrown
Like the sumac on the overpass,
Dead vines still seizing the fence.

IV

Polished brass and broken glass,
Fides and poverty have grown here equally.
Savage branches and reams of trash
And constant motor crashing
Along the road he used to walk,
Yet the blossoms fiery white
Stop an inch above his would-be head.

V

Petunias and trillium
Around the grave-like stone
Etched with only far-off, holy words
About a blackbird.
I stop my stride to read, and a black girl
In a uniform pauses to join me.

VI

Burghers' homes with coats of arms
Now look like funeral parlors.
Georgian homes with balustrades
And columns lie deserted,
Their lead glass shines with a meaning all its own.
It's a tudor and colonial show down Scarborough,
Behind mildewed stone and rust-caked spikes
And Blockwatch signs.
The Hartford Medical Society is up for sale,
A faded MUSEUM banner in one modern wrought-iron window.
The projects, rife with skunk grass, are right next door.

VII

He walked through the streets of history each day:
Saw a white-draped pineapple on brown stone,
White corner blocks and fan windows on grey stucco,
High Mansard roofs with thin pinching chimneys
And multi-colored slates, hanging spirals like earrings,
Brick frills around windows, diamond panes,
Shutters painted yellow, copper, pewter blue,
A gold-bulb-topped octagon-shaped room on a roof,
Round windows like cannons swallowed by gambrell and lace.

VIII

His was a large but ordinary house, drab and white,
Tilting down a hillside. Two yellow tulips
Mark some not-yet-forgotten space.
They lived there before I was born.
Westerly's lined with swollen cherry blossoms,
Japanese plum, crepe myrtle, and long purple trees
That rest on colonades, purple asters in the grass,
Tiny petals of purple in the ivy beds -
Enough to make the pair of cardinals blush overhead.
One flies to the mystery of the back yards,
My eyes flown restlessly away.

IX

Here, the trees wear bouquets, and the branches bow
For the man of this place,
And flowers rest facing the sky.
The roots glow transparent through the moss,
The branches spin circles through space,
The trunks still are peeling, with fat green warts;
Angling pines and majestic sycamore, fir and false cypress,
Hickory and hemlock, linden and locust;
Two oaks with shared roots look like lovers' hands clasping;
A giant elm has fallen to alms.
Birch paper on the floor, dried, curls from my touch.

X

The neighborhoods are ablaze with blooms and bees
But there are no flowers in Elizabeth Park,
Just an old stone stair to remind me of what was,
A refuge of sorts, covered over with mulch,
On tufts of hills with rock and rhododendron
Near the pond with nary a swan,
Just an island of white birch shining,
Huge red fish that just sit under milky green
As ducks scud the glimmering surface
To the plangent hoots of grouse
And the race of robins to the tips of trees.
Late afternoon, a glimpse of quiet, it turns cold -
A stillness that says he was not ever here
More than he is right now, for it all just dissolves,
And all he had to fend that off was his mind,
Turning and postulating profundities profane
That vanished when they wrote themselves down -
Like the present dog, whose cry was not enough
The moment before, but too much, after.
I rise to let my search for him go, and as I do,
I see a blackbird.

XI

This tiny black river is not the illimitable Styx,
These gusts of wind, this glistening sun, these hills
Are not the ones he saw beyond, mighty Hephaestus,
In poetic pain, who forged a name in nether light
For his muse in tinctureless steel,
A dress no muse could ever move through,
Nor any spirit caught in form could stand
Still to be measured in the glass
For the depths of its surface,
No undulatation could, after all, be captured
In the welder's fiery bloom.

XII

Congregationalist bells ring as I pass
On one side of Asylum Avenue,
Catholic on the other.
For an instant, the way this once looked
Lets me imagine it. I feel a noble air
As his office chandelier goes on.

XIII

He survived, like this city, the tired verses,
The automobiles and moving pictures, TV's
And modern painting that only grew more extreme,
The mystery school unravelings and global mind awakenings,
The unforeseen disasters and the fated world wars,
The men who walked, even, upon the ashes of the moon.
Strange his cadences remain, his sources still well hidden,
Despite the faces one now sees here, pleading to be seen,
Who pull me back, to sleep, to the thinness of my skin,
To bawdry dreams that he could not survive: the blues.