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Their minds are like flowers, calling for bees

But there are only more flowers

And a wind that blows keenly but too far away

So they pose for each other,

What they try to be, and avoid becoming,

Seeking a color that matches, shapes that contrast

In the hope that their own might be

Recognized at last for what it is:

The only thing unique among the petals.

Young Man with Cigarette

The passing traffic seethes so many misses
— What is not agreed to, understood, done —

The air seems to carry the regret
As if the smoke will never clear.

The pictures show us armies moving
Like birds across the sky ...

Some harmony we lack,
As a request for no ice in a coca-cola

Brings everyone out of their boxes to glare
And waste all their time shouting.

Hall of Recor s

It's the only government building
Without somebody's name in front,
Where what we really are
Can theoretically be seen ...
So much that we've assumed
To become those ledger numbers;
People traipse around the park
Just barely on the ground.

There always is a listener
Who's never there.
People talk into space
A little louder than is necessary
As if they'll be understood at last,
Like they're landing in a place
Where the language is the same as theirs,
How the years of shapeless tongues
Never even really happened.

Vacancy Outside of Rosamond

L'art pour l'art ... no one has touched these wastes,
No one has drawn here human shapes.

Inscrutable energies hold for an earth
That seems to exist for life to burst forth.

Its expressions are without context,
Like a voice of pure poetry.

What feelings arise are of absence,
Not any torments of its being.

Rhapsodic winds blow through joshua trees,
The sage shows the sun's constellations.

On the Hills of Tehachapi

That rock, by that tree
Overlooking the whole of the San Joaquin,
I could stay there forever
To ponder whatever is pondered
And solve nothing that needs to be solved,
With the laurels of the purple grass
Honoring each gust of mind.

But I am wanted somewhere else
For reasons I don't understand
And service that I can't conceive I'm giving,
The very reason I must go back now
To smile at all the brand new wounds
I'll lick again in private.

Antelope Valley Grass

A few abandoned homes like bad ideas
Along the high lonesome plains,
Deserts have a way of making everything impossible
The merest hopes and dreams
Fly away as crazy as napkins

The grasses tough enough to fill this whistling space
Bob with a furious shiver
That looks like fear, but it is really pain
They're enduring to survive

But when you're in with them
As the sun dots their crowns
There's so much joy,
As if the expanse of the world flows through them
And nothing needs to be explained

The grasses in the golden light know everything

Stevens Textplication #37: The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws

Continuing with his oblique critiques of authorities spiritual and otherwise, Stevens deploys a noticeably lighter touch in “The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws.” This 1921 poem is notable for the way it looks back, towards earlier English-language traditions of rhyme and allegory that are rare in Stevens’ canon, as well as ahead to distant masterworks like “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” that speak of communities of spirit represented in one comprehensive figure. Here’s the poem:

                          Above the forest of the parakeets,

A parakeet of parakeets prevails,

A pip of life amid a mort of tails.

(The rudiments of tropics are around,

Aloe of ivory, pear of rusty rind.)

His lids are white because his eyes are blind.

He is not paradise of parakeets,

Of his gold ether, golden alguazil,

Except because he broods there and is still.

Panache upon panache, his tails deploy

Upward and outward, in green-vented forms,

His tip a drop of water full of storms.

But though the turbulent tinges undulate

As his pure intellect applies its laws,

He moves not on his coppery, keen claws.

He munches a dry shell while he exerts

His will, yet never ceases, perfect cock,

To flare, in the sun-pallor of his rock.

The extended metaphor of one parakeet above other parakeets is a great example of how Stevens uses sly whimsy to insinuate new perspectives on very serious topics. The serious topic at hand is how certain people have power over other people’s thoughts (and actions).

Deadpan humor abounds, starting with the matter-of-fact comparison of parakeets’ nonsensical chatter with humanity’s collective thoughts. Stevens exaggerates the comparison by employing highly sophisticated diction to evoke the seemingly commonplace behaviors of the parakeets (including a comic stage direction aside about the over-the-top tropical décor “rudiments” that could be found to visualize such a scene). The poem’s odd but effective rhymes (alguazil – a ministerial official – with still, cock with rock) further tune its satiric pitch.

Make no mistake, however, the actual ideas that peek through this pet store window are deadly serious. The major parakeet, for one, is the only one who is alive. He is the "pip (a single blossom of a clustered head of flowers) of life," while the tails of his followers (an apt metaphor) are described as a “mort”, which means primarily “dead” but can also be used, as here, to denote “a great quantity.”

Parakeet number one is further described in the second stanza as “blind,” indicating that the purity and vision expressed in his white eyes (or “lids”, suggesting in addition maybe a hat of authority) is simply to disguise that he lacks vision.

He is “not [the] paradise” the other parakeets seek, in fact he doesn’t even move. He simply “flares” in reflection of the sun, connoting here that his presence moves ever outward to assert more power over other parakeets.

In the fourth stanza, “panache” is used in its secondary meaning of “abundance of feathers” to indicate “his tails” (the birds under his control) flick their wings crazily as if to slough off large quantities of rain. Yet he the master is no more than one “drop of [rain] water.” The power of implication is a … powerful thing.

The word “tinges,” used in the sense of colors or fragments of colors, provides a nice visual for the beauty created as these birds are excited, just as the head parakeet’s “pure intellect applies its laws” suggests a harmonious order to the proceedings, an alignment with divine order. This is reinforced by the head bird managing to conjure this effect while remaining completely still. But any release from the ominousness created by the rest of the poem is clipped by three words: “coppery, keen claws.” As Robert Bly wrote, “the teeth mother naked at last.”

Our messianic parakeet, as if to reinforce through banality his evil nature, finally (in an abrupt break from the stillness that had been depicted) “munches a dry shell while he / Exerts his will.” This suggests he has nothing to offer his flock but desiccated husks of ideas – ones that he, not they, consume. (“Dry shells” could also be read as a pointed reference to T.S. Eliot and his Wasteland, but it’s impossible to say whether that would be meant as homage or derision).

The overall effect calls to mind religious demagogues, then as now a danger to society because they propose an alternative society dedicated not to the common good but to themselves. Certain words and phrases enhance this implication: “parakeet of parakeets” like the biblical “king of kings,” blindness as spiritual insight, suggestions one is nothing more than a drop of a water in the vast ocean, “paradise”, and the “rock” this parakeet messiah stands upon.

Nevertheless, the metaphor is flexible (nonsensical?) enough to apply to any power dynamic one would care to name where human authority is vested in the thoughts of one person. This could even include, Plato forbid, poets.

I await a rich offering of interpretations that draw from the seemingly endless possibilities but, as I do not have the kind of influence to make any tails wag at my command, I don’t expect any takers. In that can be found a blessing many have fought for, and died to achieve: the independence of human thought.  

Late to the Meeting

They are not exactly unreal
But they feel like children
Typing daintily on their pads
Holding hands across their mouths
Asking questions to be heard

Seeking in all they do
To recapture the illusion
Of their mother's compassion
Or to avoid being late for
Their father's dis-appointment

They trade their things of value:
Hair curls, smart quotes,
Visions of effects
For looks of respect,
Familial laughter

They shovel down the lunch
They don't deserve
And worry out the time
They cannot solve

In hopes the ghosts who hold
What makes life important
Favor them with a song
To record for tomorrow's
Posterity of stories to be told
More fuel to unquenchable fires

That burn just like the eyes
Of the man I saw on the way
Living in the sand canals
Below the high rise
Huddled in blankets
As he sat alone
Staring at me
As if I actually had been born

New Phone Blues

How the yarn of the brain weaves its webs
To make conversations ... connected.

Only the misheard is ever remembered:
The jejune school of haiku, the hair of the doge star,
The recovery lawyers and their exploding on moguls cigars.

The self-logical journey will stub its toe at some point,
The clouds will drop so close
Flat earth is no longer a theory,

And there will be nothing to say
As the river is pinked by chemicals
But "give me my cross or give me death."

Chasing Down an Echo

Those roses play that chord.
Somewhere these two
twinned by circumstance
will meet more officially,
the dry raconteurs
who have been telling stories
to each other the whole time
but have only now,
serendipitously, met
at some tropical country club
where the chairs look out at sunsets
that seem to last forever.

Odes by Hölderlin: The Goodbye

{second version}

Weren’t we going to part? Dreamed it good? Deemed it smart?

   Then why the actors’ shock at the murderous deed?

      We know each other little,

         For within us – oh! – is a God.

Who betrayed? It was Him, who gives us everything,

   Life and meaning brought to being, inspirer,

      Guardian over our love,

         This, this I cannot hold inside.

But others fail to conceive of the earth’s meaning,

   Others exercise His office with different laws,

      And that's what the spirit wants:

         Day after day the use of us.

Well! I knew it before. Ever since the grafted

   Came to form, the fear that separates gods and man

      Must be atoned for with blood,

         The lover’s heart must be broken.

Let me be silent! Never let me from now on

   See this fatality, for even though I go

      In peace, it’s still lonely there,

         And the farewell at least is ours!

I reach for the bowl myself, so that I can save

   Enough holy poison from the Lethe to drink

      With you, to share everything,

         Hate and love, all is forgotten!

I want to go. Maybe in a faraway time

   I’ll see you, Diotima, here, with wishes bled

      To death and peaceful like the

         Deceased, to go round as strangers

Go round, conversation leading us back and forth,

   Pensive, hesitant, until the forgetful re-

      Member their place of farewell,

         And a heart thaws inside of us,

Astonished I would look at you, voice and sweet song,

   As from earlier days, would hear and play the strings,

      And the lily would waft up

         Golden over the brook and gone.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Der Abschied

Trennen wollten wir uns? wähnten es gut und klug?

   Da wirs taten, warum schröckte, wie Mord, die Tat?

      Ach! wir kennen uns wenig,

         Denn es waltet ein Gott in uns.

Den verraten? ach ihn, welcher uns alles erst,

   Sinn und Leben erschuf, ihn, den beseelenden

      Schutzgott unserer Liebe,

         Dies, dies Eine vermag ich nicht.

Aber anderen Fehl denket der Weltsinn sich,

  Andern ehernen Dienst übt er und anders Recht,

      Und es fodert die Seele

         Tag für Tag der Gebrauch uns ab.

Wohl! ich wußt' es zuvor. Seit die gewurzelte

   Ungestalte, die Furcht Götter und Menschen trennt,

      Muß, mit Blut sie zu sühnen,

         Muß der Liebenden Herz vergehn.

 Laß mich schweigen! o laß nimmer von nun an mich

   Dieses Tödliche sehn, daß ich im Frieden doch

      Hin ins Einsame ziehe,

         Und noch unser der Abschied sei!

 Reich die Schale mir selbst, daß ich des rettenden

   Heilgen Giftes genug, daß ich des Lethetranks

      Mit dir trinke, daß alles,

         Haß und Liebe, vergessen sei!

 Hingehn will ich. Vielleicht seh' ich in langer Zeit

   Diotima! dich hier. Aber verblutet ist

      Dann das Wünschen und friedlich

         Gleich den Seligen, fremde gehn

Wir umher, ein Gespräch führet uns ab und auf,

   Sinnend, zögernd, doch itzt mahnt die Vergessenen

      Hier die Stelle des Abschieds,

         Es erwarmet ein Herz in uns,

Staunend seh' ich dich an, Stimmen und süßen Sang,

   Wie aus voriger Zeit, hör' ich und Saitenspiel,

      Und die Lilie duftet

         Golden über dem Bach uns auf.

After the T’ang Masters

The only difference between a mad house and our house

Is that here the lunatics are in charge.

My voice just increases the inconsolable screaming,

Dismal whistling, petitions for happiness withheld.

I'd escape, if I could, to this quiet alcove,

Reflecting on definitions of love:

How it is always kind, and never remembers,

And perseveres through faith alone.

But the daisies so white placed here in the glass

Make all of that seem so shallow.

The Have Knots

The desert wind
          changes everything.
You sing
          in dead limbs.

In desolation
          what is living
Seems more alive
          for silence to speak.

Still too much
         dust to overcome,
Too many blossoms
         calling for bees.

New frogs
        in landing squads
Run from algae nets
        across the parched ground

Chasing the scent
       of roses.
What it is
       can't be chased,

The thought occurs
       to elude its capture.
The insects swirl
       eccentric centers.

The thought of abundance
       is earned by trust
And taken away
       by doubt.

There is no other equation,
       though it seems
What can be taken
       fails to yield.

The same spring breeze
       that tells us
We can't have tells us
       we are loved.

Hummingbirds like cataracts
       fly near cactus yellow,
On either side, a hunger
       unrequited,

And that, not
       where it ends
Is what the light, the final
       friend, desires.

The glow becomes
       almost visible
Like what rises in our blood
       and moves our hands.

Stevens Textplication #36: Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb

On the Manner of Addressing Clouds is one of many early Stevens poems that present traditional Christian practices and belief in starkly unflattering terms. “Sunday Morning” is perhaps the most famous example of this, where a Baudelairean pursuit of aesthetic contemplation is substituted as philosophical ideal for the meaningless rituals of churchgoing.

The darkest strains of Stevens’ contempt for religion as it was almost universally practiced in his time and place can be found in a series written in the aftermath of the apocalyptically deadly but spiritually meaningless first world war which might be termed “Christian burial poems,” such as Clouds, Cortege for Rosenbloom, “The Worms at Heaven’s Gate,” The Emperor of Ice Cream, “To a High-Toned Old Christian Woman,” and today’s poem, from 1921, “Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb.” These poems all reference the sine qua non of Christian belief – that today’s sacrifice to the word of Christ will redeem us tomorrow with a perpetual afterlife. As evidenced by funeral ceremonies, these poems suggest, there is no evidence whatsoever for this proposition. Death is presented as an ocean of nothingness that offers no reason for the living to follow the conventional religious dictates of faith, worship and service to others.

It could be argued that Stevens’ reputation as a major 20^th century poet derives from these poems, and the resultant critical perspective of him as a post-Nietzschean (aka post-death-of-God) poet, seeking humanistic alternatives in a world where traditional religious faith is no longer possible. Such a crisp, “modern” viewpoint certainly helps squeeze the rotund Romantic Stevens into Pound’s ascetic canon of radical reactionaries who came to deify the poet king by killing him first – just as it fits into the larger cultural “agenda” of “secular humanism” bent on catapulting the god of scientific materialism over the Judeo-Christian god just as surely – if not as honestly or elegantly – as the Greco-Roman pantheon was supplanted.

Thus Stevens is still viewed in many circles as the “atheist poet,” akin to Sylvia Plath as “confessional poet” or Bob Dylan as “protest singer.” The truth, not that such an arrow has much force in the face of such a passionate army, is that Stevens is almost exclusively and obsessively a metaphysical poet, continually capturing in his verse the unseen spirit that pervades all things. Granted, the great conflict in his work is between the ability of “poets” (Stevens’ all-encompassing term for what should not be understood as simply putting rhymes to paper) to see this mystic truth (through the vehicle of “imagination”), and the inability of much of the rest of humanity to be anything but “realists” who are trapped in a meaninglessness existence. But traditional religion, in his point of view, is just one of MANY blocks to humanity having a true, mystical perception of reality.  

That being said, there is something distinct, more personal, in these early poems on Christian belief that deserves a deeper examination. Let’s do so, using as our example “Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb:”

What word have you, interpreters, of men
Who in the tomb of heaven walk by night,
The darkened ghosts of our old comedy?
Do they believe they range the gusty cold,
With lanterns borne aloft to light the way,
Freemen of death, about and still about
To find whatever they seek? Or does
That burial, pillared up each day as porte
And spiritous passage into nothingness,
Foretell each night the one abysmal night
When the host shall no more wander, nor the light
Of the steadfast lanterns creep across the dark?
Make hue among the dark comedians,
Halloo them in the topmost distances
For answer from their icy Élysée.

Similar in form and theme to “Addressing Clouds…,” the speaker starts here by addressing, instead of specific “grammarians,” the more general “interpreters.” The inquisition, however, is the same: what can you tell us of what happens after death? Specifically, the speaker sardonically asks, what contact do these interpreters have with the dead, and inquires yeah or nay whether the “darkened ghosts of our old comedy” (a literary reference to Dante’s Divine Comedy for the interpreters) wander aimlessly about the dark, thinking they are carrying on their earthly goals (again like Dante), or whether they in fact no longer exist.

This unpromising set of choices is presented in an absurdly overwrought manner (“does / That burial, pillared up each day as porte [gateway] / And spiritous passage into nothingness, / Foretell each night the one abysmal night / When the host shall no more wander” is an exceedingly elaborate way of contrasting the “daylight” of a funeral ceremony with the “darkness” inside the tomb, for example). The possibilities are further limited by the suggestion that the still-existing dead only believe “they range the gusty cold,” which makes everything that comes after it seem like a pathetic gag, where the poor dears have no idea just how ridiculous their pretensions to purpose really are. The “freemen of death” (noble sounding but as ineffectual as the Keystone Kops) become the dark comedians of this dark comedy.

And what is more darkly funny, the speaker implies, the ghost that does not know its own absurdity, or the people who act like there’s a ghost when there isn’t one? The comic possibilities, at least, are endless.

This tone continues in the final lines: “Make hue among the dark comedians, / Halloo them in the topmost distances / For answer from their icy Élysée.” Hue and halloo mean essentially the same thing: a loud cry or clamor. Élysée is presumably the French variant of “Elysium,” the paradise of ideal happiness for the blessed after death. Its juxtaposition with “icy” suggests a contrast between an ideal or imagined state of paradise and a real location – the actual sky. These interpreters are in effect asked to noise torture the fugitive dead (as if they are Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega being bombarded by Metallica’s “Enter Sandman”) to get an answer, any answer, from them. It’s as if the more they talk, the more, rather than less, likely they will find the answers they seek.

The sense of comedy (referenced twice in the poem) is clearly that of irony. There are many interpretations why Dante called his magnum opus The Comedy, but one of the most prominent is the sense of irony, as in poetic justice or karma, everyone deliciously getting what is coming to them (including the poet by tumbling to earth after tasting heaven). The ultimate irony expressed here is that the interpreters themselves have nothing to interpret. Their punishment is to create a frightful cry out of nothingness and then try all over again.

The message of the poem is simple enough: all we know of the dead is what the living say. But the manner of presentation of this message (the degree to which heaven actually becomes a tomb) betrays a sharpness and bitterness uncharacteristic of the normally high-minded Stevens.

One fruitful way to delve further into this is to remember that Stevens didn’t seriously begin to write poems until after 1912, when he was 33 years old. That was the year his mother Kate died, and a year after his father Garrett had passed. He had not seen either parent since 1909, when he married Elsie Katchel despite their disapproval. While he described Garrett as “quite a good egg; agreeable, active,” he had a much more problematic relationship with his mother, by all accounts a devout and strict Lutheran who encouraged his artistic side. The sense – hardly commented on, since Stevens said virtually nothing his whole life about his mother – was that he carried with him quite a bit of guilt about not being a pious son, of not deserving all the care and attention she lavished on him, of marrying someone beneath his station, of not being able to get outside of himself to understand her before she died. Instead he was left, at her sudden death, with a terrible void, one that kept him from easily moving on to un-self-conscious adulthood. The one who created him had become nothing, and that left him grieving at the nothingness within and outside himself. All he could look to were the hymn books, scriptures and exegesis of a religious tradition that she lived in but that he could not, and in that he found – as if directly mocking him – a void as complete as that left by his mother. From the bitterness and pain of having stared into such an abyss he began a second lifetime where he continually searched for a spiritual alternative.

Of such struggles are great poets made.

The Propaganda of Experience

What they don't know hurts those who do
For there is no path between worlds,

The entrenched corruption of appearances
Is somehow protected, its mirrors unbroken;

People still help themselves to what might be them
And threading the gift of recognition

Demonstrate they care by intending to share
With the absence that is there.

Our vibrations in heaven,
Holograms of the whole,

Don't mind what is missing,
The reaching away in love is all.

The thing inside that needs this
Too sacred to be revealed.

Blue Flowers on the Weeds

Does the thought of those not free keep them slaves?
Or does moving away help them see?

Does the thought of God deny His being?
Or is what brings love being empty?

These are the questions that plague our minds
In starts, in shatters.

The smallest thoughts can topple walls
Yet they lift away to grow somewhere

And let the purple trees and succulents
Play inside the head like 50s jazz.

Perhaps in dreams they'll reappear
In the guise of long-dead relatives

Under purple trees, playing 50s jazz
-- The closest thing we have to forgiveness.

Through Layers Upon Layers of Mirror

As light communicates with the curb
Geometries spill across the street,
The homage in the white elegance of homes
To unknown Spaniards turns baroque.

Its art is the golden street, liquid fronds,
Green canvas sheet like a Hollywood wand
As if that's what light's for, to turn black birds silver
And vein diabolical what eyes would otherwise call real.

The iguana stares upright in his cage
At the clues the sun gives to the day,
A stare that seems empty as space. Of what he sees,
There is only what we feel there on his eye.

Odes by Hölderlin: Your Recovery

Look! Your dearest, nature, suffers and sleeps and you,

   All-healing, are missing? Or are you no longer,

      Subtle airs of the ether,

         And the source of the morning light?

All the flowers of the earth, all the golden fruit

   Joyous in the grove, all that does not heal this life,

      You gods, as it nurtures you,

         How was it that you taught yourself?

Oh! You still breathe and resound holy lust for life

   In your usual words of allurement, and yet

      Your flower in tender youth

         Shines, same as usual, for you,

Healing nature, to you, who often, too often,

   When I sank into mourning, smiled in disbelief

      With laurels around your head,

         Still a youth, same as usual!

When I mature one day, behold, as born of you,

   How I make new each day again, all-transforming,

      Your flame that turns to cinders,

         And there’s another I revive.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ihre Genesung

Sieh! dein Liebstes, Natur, leidet und schlaft und du,

   Allesheilende, säumst? oder ihr seids nicht mehr,

      Zarte Lüfte des Aethers,

         Und ihr Quellen des Morgenlichts?

Alle Blumen der Erd, alle die goldenen

   Frohen Früchte des Hains, alle sie heilen nicht

      Dieses Leben, ihr Götter,

         Das ihr selber doch euch erzogt?

Ach! schon atmet und tönt heilige Lebenslust

   Ihr im reizenden Wort wieder, wie sonst und schon

      Glänzt in zärtlicher Jugend

         Deine Blume, wie sonst, dich an,

Heilge Natur, o du, welche zu oft, zu oft,

   Wenn ich trauernd versank, lächelnd das zweifelnde

      Haupt mit Gaben umkränzte,

         Jugendliche, nun auch, wie sonst!

Wenn ich altre dereinst, siehe, so geb ich dir,

   Die mich täglich verjüngt, Allesverwandelnde,

      Deiner Flamme die Schlacken,

         Und ein anderer leb ich auf.

Trash Night

Finally quiet now, with the cans on the road,
The slightest crisp of wind blows through the palms,

No pretense from the neighbors, no airs of dogs or cars,
The lawn, wet with soft light, finally takes its turn to speak

To remind you that the work to do has already been done,
The peace of dusk comes at the end of what's left unresolved,

The moon will overcome the silent things that can't be said,
Its soothing light makes all that is invisible grow larger.

What goes on in the house becomes a gentle hue,
Taking guidance from the world of moving shadows and white clouds.

Conversation Between Man and Tree

The trees hold up their leaves for me,
Teaching the reach out to bees and light,
Showing my head how to nod, shoulders
To sway, finger to rise to a point.

The leaves that glitter like the sun
Wave unspoken honor
In a wind turned visible by birds
As if the field went on forever

And the branches didn't tangle
In the contours of the logic
That moved from to to fro, in circles,
Grasses lifting thought.

The force the boughs withstand
Is neither turbulence nor anger,
But their own openness to shock,
How they'll follow the unknown.

Flowers edged like butterflies
And vibrant as the bees
Share ambrosial happiness
Ever conscious of the source

Circling round a center that is nowhere,
As if air currents that decide
The shadow's letters, green leaf gestures,
The yielding from positions

Are not anything one could call ... meaning,
And yet they mean, the speech of spring,
Unbroken and unknowable, as the wind, if risen
Slightly, would take our voices in its sound.

Stevens Textplication #35: On The Manner of Addressing Clouds

Critic bashing is a noble sub-genre in all the arts – not just poetry. Rarely has the creator been more sly in “addressing” his critics, though, than Stevens in his 1921 poem “On the Manner of Addressing Clouds,” which turns the obscure words and abstract concepts literary critics have long been famous for keeping artists safely under control with back against them (with such subtlety the targets may not even know they are the subject of the poem – as evidenced by the many different interpretations offered for it by critical professionals). It’s Stevens at his most playful, which, as here, often ends up also being his most serious. Here’s the poem:

Gloomy grammarians in golden gowns,
Meekly you keep the mortal rendezvous,
Eliciting the still sustaining pomps
Of speech which are like music so profound
They seem an exaltation without sound.
Funest philosophers and ponderers,
Their evocations are the speech of clouds.
So speech of your processionals returns
In the casual evocations of your tread
Across the stale, mysterious seasons. These
Are the music of meet resignation; these
The responsive, still sustaining pomps for you
To magnify, if in that drifting waste
You are to be accompanied by more
Than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon.

The key word in the poem is the addressee, the “you,” who is identified as “grammarians.” This is an exceedingly old word, one that predates the modern idea of grammar as a set of rules for language. The closest analogue to “grammarian” in modern parlance is “philologist” (admittedly not a particularly contemporary term either), someone who studies word derivations, preserves texts, and offers interpretations. There were two major schools of grammarians in the ancient world, the Greek, who focused on literary art as we might conceive it, and the Hebrew, who focused primarily on religious texts. This creates a double meaning for the word, and the poem, as Stevens addresses scholars both literary and religious, and shows them how to address, or discuss, the texts they use as a rod of power in the human sphere.  

These grammarians make a grand and appropriately alliterative entrance in the poem, like a cloud moving across the sky: “Gloomy grammarians in golden gowns”. They are clouds to block the light, yet they wear the clothes of light-bringing authority. The speaker, when addressing them, continues the metaphor: “meekly you keep the mortal rendezvous,” suggesting their role, that of showing heaven to mortals, is a dreary, unobtrusive and almost contractual duty.

Their “manner” is to “elicit” – call to expression – “the still sustaining pomps…” Pomps is another archaic word Stevens retrieves – like a grammarian – seemingly to cover his real intentions. Separate from “pomp,” it is an ostentatious display of exaggerated self-importance. In that context, the rest of the sentence suggests an inflated manner of expression completely at odds with the paucity of meaning in what is said: “… pomps / Of speech which are like music so profound / They seem an exaltation without sound.” One could of course take this the opposite way, that the grammarians are guardians and cultivators (as they presumably suppose) of the most sublime expressions of the human connection to the divine – one too fine to even be heard by mortal ears (at least without a "guide"). These opposite readings come together in the sense that what is left of all the hubbub for us non-grammarians is silence.

On a non-literal level "pomps" suggests the appearance of fluffy clouds as they move through the sky, akin to the metaphor of pom-poms. But whether the pomps in question are the texts dissected by the scholars or the textual interpretations created by the scholars creates additional ambiguity that makes it appropriately hard for the reader to give these clouds definition. One must hold in mind when considering/addressing the nature of these clouds rolling across the poem the dual possibility that both the source texts themselves (at least as the interpreters conceive them) and the interpretations (aka the “lit crit shit” that Kenneth Rexroth aptly called “the fog machine”) are equally vapor.

The next sentence appears to confirm that by referring directly to the sources of interpretation, themselves interpretations (of reality): “Funest philosophers and ponderers, / Their evocations are the speech of clouds.” “Funest” is one of Stevens’ most noted unusual words. It stands out in the entire poem, and its meaning stands out in the context of its use: “Causing death or disaster, fatal, catastrophic, deplorable.” How could philosophers and ponderers be so hazardous? Simply because, in trying to determine the meaning of life, they are stuck instead with the insolvable question of “what is death?” Thus those who would reflect on their thoughts end up stuck thinking about death rather than life. This is “the speech of clouds” because it goes literally above our heads. 

The speaker goes back to addressing the grammarians: “So speech of your processionals returns / In the casual evocations of your tread / Across the stale, mysterious seasons.” Processionals are the books that contain litanies and hymns for use in religious processions, most notably funerals. In that metaphor, the only sound or maybe sense (“speech”) in what’s collected in the book to commemorate death is found in the funereal “tread” – "the manner or sound of someone walking" – of the grammarians themselves, completely outside of the book or its spoken/sung contents. In other words, there are, as people often say at death, no words. The seasons themselves (an apt metaphor for the cycle of life and death) are both “stale” and “mysterious,” reinforcing the sense that there is nothing in words or even celebrations to add freshness or meaning to what is inherently unknowable.

“These,” the speaker continues, referring to the steady beat of the grammarians’ steps, “Are the music of meet resignation; these / The responsive, still sustaining pomps for you / To magnify.” Meet – or just – resignation – or acceptance – of the enormity of death can only be found in the ceremony of silently carrying the coffin away. The almost imperceptible sound of that is the true text to interpret. This is not simply a bitter and mocking rejoinder to those who would comfort us by explaining the reasons for suffering and death, it is also a statement that there is something real in that sound itself, like a cat padding across a tin roof when it is raining, that makes it more important than the words people use, as if it opens up a vein of suggestion that connects the human to what is beyond human. The true poetic, in other words. Stevens plays here on the sound of the word “pomps” to suggest what the honoring feels like, a gentle (and tangible) “pomp” of feet. This sound, the poetic residue of experience rather than the mind’s chapter and verse explanations, is what is responsive and can be, the speaker asserts, magnified.*

After all the juggling of literal with figurative, literary with spiritual, contemplated with experienced, created with interpreted, addressing as speaking to with addressing as responding to, and life with death, the poem’s final lines shoot a Stevensian arrow through all the grandiloquence as if it was so much tawdry scenery: “if in that drifting waste / You are to be accompanied by more / Than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon.”

It’s an exponential leap to say, after vague and fanciful suggestions as to the identity of the clouds in the poem’s title, that they are “drifting waste.” “That’s the rationalist,” as Stevens wrote in another poem, the one who can’t escape literal reality enough to see anything beyond the impenetrable surface. All grammarians are consigned to this prison of meaninglessness unless they embrace what could be called everything from fanciful imagination to mystical consciousness: the natural, invisible and highly personal way feelings are generated and deepened in response to, for example, the desultory hesitation of feet. It may or may not be “real”, but without it even the sun and moon are just shiny objects, without voice (“mute”) or meaning (“bare”).

Stevens, then and now, is old-fashioned enough to still be hopeful such a thing might actually happen.

 * Note the similarity of the words used here (pomps, tread) to the similarly constructed Cortege for Rosenbloom, where the funeral procession also self-importantly dishonors the dead.

What We Know About Him

The facts are bare, but the only hope offered

To capture the firefly in a bottle.

He “might have felt this …” and “may have said that …”

Before making manifest what's disembodied.

So biographers prosecute the defenseless,

Sift the not prevaricated through sieves

To try the sole capital crime for the immortals:

Standing apart from the way life is lived.

And is there not one among you, dear readers,

Who didn’t wish our blessed and deified hero

To be another of heaven’s cruel jokes,

A rancid vessel for impeccable hopes?

Such effort to bring the saint back from the clouds

Where he floated when we had denied him.

If even one inmate escapes from the island

There has to be, has to be some explanation.

Voices in May

Cigarette butts like flagpoles in black sand …

So beauty lurks beyond this moving screen,

Something calls us from some other world

To see, as truth, the diamonds in the tar,

The quiet music of the way chairs are,

Sunlight’s textures as it’s caught inside of forms,

Watch heaven overhang the afternoon

And people talk to no one on their phones,

Share flavorless brioches with no mouths,

Tease no eyes with their lips, provide no maps

With excruciatingly exquisite

Specifics, but trail ribbons that are rich

In nothingness, who resound with absence,

Singular squalls lost in city hiss.

A receipt is dropped, and swirls in the wind,

Merges with what moves inside the mind.

These empty figures, they are really in the sky,

And not among this paradise of birds

Who make their philosophie sound so free,

For they speak of sage and Europe, babies

And chlorine with the one that rules it all.

The wind turns the shadows into voices

To compose the unregarded responses.

The Aristocracy of the Invisible

I.

As the napkin is opened, the folds

Seem like something else

As the Peloponnesian War

Seems like something else:

A glimmer of a common inheritance

As common as something can be at least

Locked inside a private scrutiny.

II.

The invisible shapes itself

Around everything we see

—The feeling is of poetry— 

Wordless, without form,

It lies within us, hungering,

To connect what is

To what we see— 

Layered in like a veil,

We lose it in the literal;

It is either not it or exact,

Shareable as crystal

Or non-existent.

III.

A shade of blue

Is so much more than a color,

It seems impenetrable,

Like the universe

Or the ways of man,

But it is me,

With it within,

That can’t be breached,

I’m responsible

For what is endless,

Unredeemable

Even as my own

Endlessness

Is nothing more

Than a persistent rumor

And my redeemability

More and more seems

To take the form

Of that blue.

The Cost of Obsession

On the saddlehorn mounds
— Smell of pampas burn —
Wheelies fling through air —
One foot, no foot, no hands —
Contortions of bicycle and man —
The other riders would rather towel snap
Than praise — they watch the physics
Like disinterested scholars ...
                                                      But one man
Talks to everyone, the only professor in this
Living classroom. He offers tips, critiques,
Standards that seem in his way of telling to be
Laws. Fearless youth become in his guidance
A sober crew. They gain the mark of a tribe
Gifted and cursed with a light on what's right.

The bikes paint dust in circles
Through the blue afternoon
And it is almost by accident I see it:

The bent tires and pizza boxes
In a canopy inside the woods,
Faded blankets and garish shirts
Strewn across the soft green floor
Where a teakettle and candles also lie,
Commemorating some departed mind.
A woolen hoodie hangs over a branch
In late-afternoon gold, and over all
That smell, the tell-tale marker
When the one who lives here
Is invisible.

First They Get Lost

What does it matter, when one is given a road

And follows it, if the direction is wrong?

It’s easy to see, looking down from the sky,

The waste and complication, but easy too

To see how it works out down the line,

How things must keep moving

Though we pray it will stop.

Yet we fidget at lights like we might miss something.

We never do. All facets of the illusion

Reveal themselves in time, and in a blink of an eye,

Reveal themselves as untrue.

Direction implies a destination, where you were

Supposed to go rather than where you ended up.

The life on the map v. the one on the ground.

Not different in any of the real respects

Except one you take with you

And don’t leave a trace behind.

Evenings with Harmonia

In an instant chaos turns to order.

It’s not easy living with the Gods.

No amount of graffito agitprop

Can destroy civility’s thread,

As if they must live these dark lives of

Excess, fret and disputation without knowing

How the inevitable balance will

Inevitably come out of the madness

No matter how hard they try

To be on the wrong side of everything but history;

Harmoniousness just flows, the doors open and close

In perfect time, the singing breaks out when the woman

Enters the salon. The flap of pigeon wings arrests the melody

But it adjusts, always, through the riffling of coffee cups,

Deep inquisitive cackles, the padding of the Athens cats

Clapping together inevitably with heels. An empty field

Between burned out roofs will open to a spiral stair

Dancing with the moon, weeds waving in tune. It starts

Just late enough, and ends only a moment too soon.

Things become so simple, when everything can be explained

But the pain one feels, and the way that it appeared is

Burned away, the many truths placed before the one.

No matter how irregular the tiles appear

There’s always a pattern. One they cannot escape,

This harmony balanced on the head of a pin. Such balance

As is required when the mistakes of humans must be evaded.

An Orthodox Church by Red Candlelight

The Christians have infiltrated every part of the holy city

But have kept a pilgrim’s innocence:

Look at this savior we just unearthed, isn’t it cool

How he’s outlasted death?

Pigeons hide on the cross.

Manifestation stays within our reach.

Madonna and Child are transparently

Mary Magdalene and Jesus’s baby.

Crowns on the caskets, beards on the priests,

The sun is a jar on a woman’s head.

The hymnless singing brings out beggars

To sell candles in full entrepreneurial force.

The History of Western Civilization

Red poppies – “you’re in my sun, Diogenes” –

The Attic Aristocrats still cavil – Peripatos in stone –

Gods and man one and the same are buzzing flies in grass –

The shade of the Judas tree at some halfway spot

Between what is and what is not – the checkerboard stage

Where orators played to two audiences, the people in the seats

And the Gods in the temples above – bamboo claps at

Applause lines provided by the sea, but the whispered

Words no longer are clarified – still, a graffiti eye

Stares up at the columns – why were we – O cruel Gods –

Forsaken? The grasses stand erect, obeying the syllables

That flow like water through stones glowing with

Embodiment, placed just so, precarious yet prostrate

In offering – moths float and dogs laugh in consummate

Distances – 

                      From our Civilization to the Gods

Is 30 feet of stairs – but it seems insurmountable –

The first columns stand oblivious to us – the threat of

Destruction we represent – but time has worked its wonders –

The perfection of decline – the scrolls are bit out, gouged,

Browned, the ceiling hollowed out to let in the blue – calling

What is not yet deceased, or born – what we’d call ruined –

Figures unrecognizable, as if what's there was only ever

Decoration – to be cataloged and piled – harmonizing columns –
For humans who build labyrinths – as if epiphanies can be
Sustained – but whose epiphany, and why does order rise
To the top? The cedars at the top shriek as if they know
And need to tell – forever disclosing next to the forever
Undisclosed.

                         I sit on the rock, like the poets before me,

Contemplating the poetry bloodstream of our history –
Only the most pure could make this trek – it is undisturbed –
The discourse that occurred here – spare and precise instruction,
No possible variation in response.

                                                                Over at the Greek flag,
However, the sky is the limit on what can be said now,
Any pronouncement can be unpronounced later – it’s OK
To scream or laugh or cry – the wind will help us forget it,
So when we revisit the same tremulous branch, it will bend
With ease, and we will gallivant as if it never will end –
For indeed it doesn’t.

                                        Didn’t that golden mean equation lead
Only to a library of unsolved explanations? So much blahblahblah
To Athena’s owl, who sees the black cat scamper across the rubble,
Like no human can, suddenly to disappear like the Gods
In the broken teeth of pediment – only the pious Carytids,
Always staring away, see.

                                              The marble that shines from within
Is the ground we walk on – offerings made from far away seem

Clearest in conception; when we get up close, knees weaken,
Words fail, the weight of all we’ve been told to be real lightens
As it deepens – the stones that guided the way through blind youth
Are revealed to be gems after all, more real for being pragmatized
As an ideal, like the dry beds we walk through where there might
Have once been water – a sublime that never needed to be captured –
The structure was built to be imagined into existence – the strongest
Foundation, the lightest air – in the valley, diamonds shine from roofs,

Another worship available from the immortals – art is what is

Crowned in acanthus leaves: the meaning of the Gods.

Two Temples

I. Hölderlin in Sounio

The Ionian coves – lit from underneath –

They no longer let the rock speak.

But the grass on the hill has something to say

About the Gods once dead and buried.

The rock partridge coos as she flows uphill

And Poseidon whispers in blue some variant of peace,

For there is still piety here on this rock, a minor

Architectural marvel turned into a thing of epic honor:

                        “Place me on Sunium’s marbled steep

                         Where nothing save the waves

                         There swan-like let me sing and die.”

Only locals and Germans come any more to this

Shore to savor ruin, and remember in photo memorials

This fort of war. The grieving Greeks don’t seem to

Grieve, they move through what is with ease

And recognize something in the care of the immortals

If not the same ones who died. Still, what has fled

Has yet to be replaced. There’s only the sun,

Our instrument, everything else is gone.

II. The Goddess of the Invisible

Amid the sacred forms she said

“There is only the invisible,” or seemed to,

In the move of the pistachio leaves.

Meaning whirrs where no claims can be made,

As Aphaia escaped from Minos by disappearing;

She’s the one who remains, still beckoning at what’s holy:

The rasping grass, the shine on seeds, the changing

Patterns in the fields. Speechless teaching

Free to be perceived or not, but the mind

That expands the universe does not disturb

The eyes or ears of those who trap meaning for a prize.

“Everything serves the invisible,”

She said, without further elucidation,

Because none was needed. I just thought

A moment earlier there was.

Life in Museums

I. Egypt

Poetry is written across the gowns

Of the impossibly serene faces with hands that

Hold palms and hooks of manifestation.

Green-skinned knowledge cries from secret eyes

For the real to be revealed as the ideal.

From Gods far more benign: Humans more actual.

What has happened to us? Who no longer put

The boxes of the dead inside our hearts,

Or ride papyrus boats with ankhs ablaze

Knowing dung beetles co-equal with kings.

II. Eleusis

Aphrodite, Demeter and Persephone,

Always those three, seated in the sanctuary,

Piously cloaked, while the arrogant spear

Throwing boys go unclothed.

Demeter reveals only her Wheat,

Persephone her Horses for the Journey,

Aphrodite her beating Wings.

The initiates proceed without knowing

If they are lovers, mothers, daughters, twins,

They only know the precise instruction

And that knowledge itself is the only salvation

For knowledge, as they offer myrtle branches

And are harnessed to otherworldly horses,

Having broken the death cult amphora.

The thought of death had kept them from life

As a mote keeps light from the eye.

Now they are free. Now piety begins.

Parisien Vignettes

I. Mansard Dreams at the Tuilleries

People in green chairs, a rarefied air where the real

Won’t protrude on the idée, where a crow glares

Atop marbled hair, like a priest says “Vive la guerre!”

Before the fountain, as gypsies trade in compassion

And free-range guitar threads the conversation

Through statues of women, all naked.

I’d declare, “The flowers are short, sculpture is long”

But the poet chairs are roped off: Too fragile.

II. The Haunting of French Painting

Monet creates … his own world

To save us from the one that calls.

A demi-glace of lilac frisson

To veil where light is pure

Abstraction. The source as void permits

All fates: Watery erasures, elaborate refusals,

A few boughs of earth in the spirit maze

Add solidity to cloud, gas to marsh grass,

Takes time back from the sundial.

For Van Gogh, the dry earth comes too hard:

No metaphysical haystacks and cathedrals for him

But ones you can taste, that taste like defeat

Starry nights when the moths die at your feet,

End of an era of light.

Eternal friend Gauguin mourns how one can’t

Have pity, only call for the colors from every aperture:

Prussian Blue, Helios Red, Raw Sienna.

You cannot be Christ

If you’re looking.

Everyone’s done their self-portrait

On the wall of the art supply store:

Every possible choice within limited means of vision.

It’s overwhelmingly close, not that impossible horizon of

lapis noire … gris de payne … vert moyen … ocre de chair …

The kept phallus of the woman Paris rose in light

As the clouds roamed the Seine and I realized why

The Impressionists failed so totally.

III. In a Station of the Metro

The subway speaks above the Gallic purr,

Some voice that had gone missing in the lust for contact,

An echo in the chasm of loss, as if through Gothic stone,

Sacred archways of emptiness tuned to instruction frequencies

From saxophones and steel drums off white ceramic walls

That weave between the realms in reams of sound

Jumpy and forlorn, as silent to the way things are

As riders with their hopeful eyes and pursing lips,

For love is always waiting, however long the pause,

However faint the flicker through the windows.

The stations are emblazoned in blue, and all the stops

Are at Saints: Saint Lazare, Saint Francois, Saint Denis.

The pilgrims take their bags and coats

And journey to the light. The sound below

From grates above has something of the street,

The distant hum of memories builds a nest,

A palimpsest where what is lost can rest.

IV. The Birth of Kings

Through golden glass, dust floats in heaven’s obsolescence

With tales of the cross preserved in words of mortal slavery.

Saint-Chappelle, where kings are crowned, next to the court

Of “LIBERTÉ, ÉGALITÉ, FRATERNITÉ”,

Cedes nothing to the freedom of the people to be

Other than equally invisible.

The crowned Madonna welcomes you with supercilious glare

As the Baby beams out petulant to the suckers at His toes.

The angels and the cardinals bow before an idea

Of overwhelming gold and blue sky glass.

The saints have turned to stone – they’re clinging to the roof.

The monks walk up in circles with their candles

Spreading light on scenes of agony that bring comfort to the room.

The halo-red apostles who with one hand hold a dove

Wield in the other a sword. They have forsaken the world

And Greco-Roman bodily perfection, to be giants in a realm

Where the heavens have closed in.

V. The Death of Gods

The cold marble of burial: Clovis, Carloman, Pepin Le Bref

With scepter, crown and lions even in death,

Jeanne de Bourbon with her dogs forever tiny at her feet,

The heart of Louis 17 on display if not still on trial.

They pray in marbled flowing robes of white

Save one black crypt: “Reine – identification incertaine.” 

But in fact the strictest scholarly tradition of France
Can’t vouchsafe said bones belong to said kings,

Rescued as they were from pauper’s graves after the crazy days

Of the bloody Revulsion, when they came with spades
To St. Denis to prey. They say the bones of Antoinette, Marie

Were brought back here intact. But the common ossuary

Of Merovingian royalty suggests otherwise.

The anointed ones were anything but martyrs
Before the peasants moved their bones, but now they glow,

In suspended state, a renunciation miracle.

A Wistfulness Towards Ivy

The professor knows
What fools we would make him become
As the fire of our minds would burn through his papers
And our watery eyes deny him voice,

So he opts for the con:
That you, dear student,
Know nothing,
Just like Plato!

Incoherent theories
In unintelligible words
Are the only remainder
Unassailable.

Nothing else is what it means,
No logic can survive
Inevitable inquisition,
Mind the Titan always eats its young.

It's easier to leave the children
With nothing but the dream,
For who can hang with history,
Its permanence of error?

Who'd track the clues to what must be unknowable
And convince the priests such tracings
Be preserved, their fragile shoots continued
In the hope that one day we may be less wrong?

The free market of the streets absorbs it all
Without a footnote.
They call it movement,
What it does,

The carving up of that which needs to be heard
To make it something mortal,
Its error unrecorded,
Its holiness implied not merely refuted.

Thoughts on Will

There is spirit in these creations.
Life despite it all shines out
From cars, houses, chairs,
More inarticulate maybe than nature
But just as needy. It wants to
Change us, so we vibrate with what
Grows outside.

But we can’t perceive this constant

Grace, the swirls on concrete that speak,
The squeal at the gate that needs listening,
The copter that needs to know it’s not mere
Dragonfly — it's like these steel shapes
And polymer personalities
Still are not worthy.

Even now we see the animals and plants

As senses to engage, real somehow,
Not like what we created, though

It always was that other mind,
The one that lets us think
It’s our decision,
Our plan.

The notes of a piano play, still alive,
From 1953, not what we want it to say
But what it is, what we would call
Breathing, if we didn't fixate on
The differences in our faces, in trying
To make the common
Stand apart.

The water expressed in a fountain's
Trap knows a freedom, like these
Words I capture that move on,
Nomads in the monad, to some
Frequency that calls
In certain turnings
Of the wind.

So we who are fixed, who can
No more evolve, may see
Celestial spinning
Of what we’ve set free,
With the look of the horizon,
The taste of apples, the sound
Of baby birds.

Regrets of the Hive Slave

And so the feel becomes the real
With nothing but antennae
To protect us from the hidden
The world inside no longer viable
Encased in a fear of the other

True immortality dies
As the waves of desire are conjured like a cobra
By the old invisible wands

A flurry of codes and numbers
A library of explanations
But nothing anyone says makes any sense
As what is real

The life within cannot be shared
It has no voice
It has no name
It only glitters with all heaven has to say
And nothing more

Photos by Nan Goldin

The faces look so holy, so guilty,

Imbued with hues of blue,

But what they do, so angry

With finality, whatever suffering

They possess isn't there.

It’s in their eyes, with lip caught

Hanging mid-thought, hair

As it’s pulled back taut.

It overwhelms the streets

And rooms and piers

Like lights on chandeliers.

One wants to cradle instead what rots away,

Some dated monograph, some player

From the 50’s, some image

Of what stays, what never breathed

Our air, or made us disappear.

The gesture that cancelled is sweeter

Than the eye that never ends.

Words Again

Too much has been said.

           Will my last breath

Redeem words that were,

           when they understood,

Unfeeling, parsimonious

but voluminous, mellifluous

When I didn’t have a clue

of the damage I could do

Where silent people lived?

How could one be wrong so many times

            unless convinced that he was right?

And think that insight could be held inside a line

            like a shadow holds a branch

When everything’s already known,

            it’s just some children finding out?

Perhaps their smile is not the one

            that says they’re first to shore,

Perhaps it’s just a look of joy

            when trees give way

And the vista appears,

But it's a vista that’s so far away

            for what is needed here:

To receive an ice cream cone from someone,

            to prove that I’m not what they say,

To tell what I did, how it happened,

            who I am.