Stevens Texplication #39: The Ordinary Women

100 years is a long time even in poetry. The manners and habits of ordinary life are so different now than in 1922, when “The Ordinary Women” was written, it’s hard for contemporary sensibilities to feel the frisson at the heart of the poem. But then again, in 1931, R.P. Blackmur, one of the most astute poetry critics of the 20^th century, said of it, “I am at a loss, and quite happy there, to know anything literally about this poem.” So maybe the incomprehensibility of poetry is something immortal after all!

Blackmur's praise alludes to the poem’s sonorous and unexpected language rich with archaisms, as well as the ease and panache with which Stevens pulls off another of his self-devised poetic forms. Here the stanzas consist of two iambic hexameter lines, the second one having an internal rhyme, followed by a three-beat line and an equally odd five-beat line. The overall effect (carried over in the diction as well) is a lush romantic set up that’s abruptly clipped into Asian-like cadences that echo anxiously in the air. Here’s the poem:

Then from their poverty they rose,
From dry catarrhs, and to guitars
They flitted
Through the palace walls.

They flung monotony behind,
Turned from their want, and, nonchalant,
They crowded
The nocturnal halls.

The lacquered loges huddled there
Mumbled zay-zay and a-zay, a-zay.
The moonlight
Fubbed the girandoles.

And the cold dresses that they wore,
In the vapid haze of the window-bays,
Were tranquil
As they leaned and looked

From the window-sills at the alphabets,
At beta b and gamma g,
To study
The canting curlicues

Of heaven and of the heavenly script.
And there they read of marriage-bed.
Ti-lill-o!
And they read right long.

The gaunt guitarists on the strings
Rumbled a-day and a-day, a-day.
The moonlight
Rose on the beachy floors.

How explicit the coiffures became,
The diamond point, the sapphire point,
The sequins
Of the civil fans!

Insinuations of desire,
Puissant speech, alike in each,
Cried quittance
To the wickless halls.

Then from their poverty they rose,
From dry guitars, and to catarrhs
They flitted
Through the palace walls.

Stevens is always obsessed with how imagination makes reality seem meaningless, as reality makes imagination seem illusory. What better way to explore the ever-shifting interplay between these two poles than by examining an evening at a movie theatre? This gives the poet a chance to reflect on how celluloid illusions shape and transform us, just as it allows a spotlight on the not-so-pretty mechanics of how those illusions are created.

The poem begins with the word “then,” which suggests the poem takes place in the middle of the incoherent stream of modern life, where the pace created by mobility and convenience causes events to arise and shift rapidly, without resolution, the only constant being the time as “this happened then that happened.” The women who rose from poverty weren’t permanently emancipating themselves from economic bondage, they were just temporarily escaping into the opulence of a movie theatre.

The opening (and awe-inspiring) rhyme of catarrhs with guitars (bearing in mind catarrhs means “copious discharge of mucus”) serves as a typical Stevensian trope about art and the receiver (for which he often employed guitars, then nowhere near the dominant instrument of American musical culture it would one day become, to signify, as if he had a vision of Leo Fender somewhere inside his head). Thus, the women brought their weeping /emotion (and coughing/wheezing) into the movie theatre, where they were met (in those days) by guitar players accompanying the (silent) picture.

“They flitted” (moved swiftly and lightly, almost secretively) “through the palace walls,” suggesting the glee of transport and escape into a fantasy paradise, the super-extravagant movie “palace” of the day. “They flung monotony behind” to crowd these “nocturnal halls,” where they huddled in “lacquered loges” and “mumbled zay-zay and a-zay, a-zay.” The passages are both journalistically sound as physical description and poetically redolent of the feelings evoked from what must have been a new and thoroughly exciting affair. The rich brown of the loges (the first section of a balcony in a theatre) is richly depicted, while the sound of excited talking is perfectly rendered as “zay-zay and a-zay, a-zay,” with its echoes of “say” and “I say.”

The crowd quieted when “the moonlight fubbed the girandoles.” This is an exquisite yet evocative way of saying “moonlight did some sleight of hand trickery on the candelabras in the theatre.” It makes perfect sense if the moonlight is the strange sudden beam of light coming from above, also known as a movie projector light. The flickering of movies is well known for its effect on objects it touches, and Stevens makes full use of this throughout.

Said movie light – like the moon – made the dresses cold, just as it stilled (made “tranquil”) the spectators, and created a “vapid haze” in the “window-bays,” a wonderful description of the ornate boxes found in old movie houses, where they could look through the “window” to another reality.

After playing with multiple meanings in the word window, Stevens goes practically pun-crazy in stanza five. From their window-sills they could see “the alphabets,” which refers not only to the intertitles in silent movies that capture for viewers much of the dialogue, but the stars, which are categorized by the letters of the Greek alphabet. The alpha stars are major, the beta secondary and the gamma even less bright. In the days of the Greeks, the people looked to the stars for answers. In the days of moving pictures, they look, of course, on Hollywood stars, where there are similar levels – the term “A-lister” derives from this use. It appears these ladies were watching what was referred to as a B movie. But they did see in the “canting curlicues” of all the movies of that time (the slanting designs around the words on the title cards ((as well as the sanctimonious rhetoric and circular plots of early movies))), that this film was about heaven and it was written in a heavenly script (note again the double meaning). Put another way, the movie and its cathedral were like preacher and church had earlier been, with powerful words and miraculous effects and impossible transportations to unfamiliar places.

“And there they read [on the cards] of marriage-bed. / Ti-lill-o!” Just as the churches know how to use our daily concerns to gain our sympathetic alignment, the movie here presents what is presumably an adulterous situation for the ladies to be titillated by. “And they read right long,” gaining moral strength in others’ moral downfall, with a Southern accent to boot (“right long”), which comports to Stevens’ sense (expressed in a letter to his wife) that the churches of the South were still real, in contrast to the “moribund” North.  

Again, we see precise description combined with rich suggestion, with a lot covered in a few lines. Stanza seven steps back from the relationship between the viewers and the viewed to the assistants who were helping with the reel illusion, the “gaunt guitarists on the strings” whose background music “rumbled [appropriately] a-day and a-day, a day” as if in response to their earlier commotion. “The moonlight / Rose on the beachy floors” cues the projection team with its apt metaphor for the graininess of film.

This movie light illuminated (made “explicit”) – as movies in theatres do – the hair-do’s (“coiffures”) of the viewers, rendering them as diamonds, sapphires and sequins … all the glitters in the Hollywood firmament. They become one with the movie, as movie-goers have been ever since. Even their “civil fans” gain the imprimatur of the glitterati.  

Stanza nine takes the comedy imbedded in the overripe descriptions into overt irony. “Insinuations of desire” reminds the reader that this story-telling is fake and manipulative, “puissant (extremely powerful) speech … Cried quittance” (a release or discharge from a debt or obligation) so the women who paid their two bits to get in would feel suitably entertained, and the halls were revealed to be “wickless” (yet another archaic word Stevens employs in this poem about the newest modern invention), which could be a nod to the physical fact that the light doesn’t come, as in churches and stages, from a candle, or it could be an observation that these people are not part of any real community, they are only together in being drawn in like moths by the magic movie light.

“Then,” just as rapidly as they came, they depart the theatre. The catarrh/guitar rhyme is reversed. They rose again from their poverty (which they didn’t really lose after all, or perhaps they gained a new kind), from the “dry” (sterile or no longer played) guitar accompanists and back to whatever afflictions they came with, leaving a la Cinderella the same “palace walls” they had gloriously entered before, as if suddenly banished from court.

It’s clear Stevens uses ironic detachment to depict how shocking movies must have been to sensibilities raised on books and candlelight storytelling. This sense of shock, unfortunately for us, is so familiar with each new displacing technology that this poem seems like a relic of that strange time when poetry and the other arts were awkwardly trying to adapt to a mechanized world where there was no longer any pretense of the old Gods. The clinging to the old dictionaries here – like holding on the bible as the demon attacks – seems somehow absurd, like a 1906 newspaper story appearing in today’s New York Times.

Still, the poem refuses to give up on Poetry itself, which is no less threatened by the rise of the picture house than any other art form. In giving up all the tricks he had to Poesy, Stevens shows us a commitment that can help us shine through the dark ages here and to come.

When the Strings become Visible

What does it mean
          to walk like
A human being?
          Is there some
Connection that
          must be broken?

To see the lights
          turn inward
The flame no more
          than a display
The reach no greater
          than that of a tree

I convince myself
          I'm watched for clues
To get keys to the puzzle
          from which I've sprung
Some unimpeachable proof
          that I'm not wrong

Instead the separate stories
          seem to blend
As one vast
          victimhood
Of what will not
          be listened to
    
But how could such indifferences
          exist?
There's only me
          and I walk past
The something that
          has happened

Could I try to catch up
          or just keep walking
Knowing no one's
           watching
When my shoes hit
            the horizon

Above the Fountain

It’s a sculpture

               one of thousands

                              most now melted down

He got ripped off

               is all he remembers

                              and the breasts a few mls thicker

A thousand pass in front each day

               few pay some respect

                              avert their gaze

Fewer mutter things, about Venus

               or is it Artemis?

                              or the clean lines of de stijle

(But that is only to impress

               those already bullied

                              by the aforementioned size of breast)

Yet something in it stirs

               some Mona Lisa smile

                              as if the real is there to taunt

For it symbolizes, despite its nakedness, some

               refuse of immortality

                              some glimpse of latent beauty

Something that exists so we don’t have to

             that we’re supposed to feel but not

                              allowed, despite it all, to see

Perturbations in the Grid

These strangers are too much inside me
With compassionate stares
And opening-night eyes, what form
I have is nothing before theirs.

They say it's only a mirror
Moving like a pool,
It's anything I want it to be,
These faces blurred like jewels.

There is no place outside myself;
I'm the alien one
Offering some half-gone crumbs
From half-forgotten homes,

With nothing I can offer in response.
It's what they call an answer, one hand
Clapping, the question asked
To its end,

The back I turned the only kind of yes,
The no of getting lost in oneness
Narrows to a point where we disappear
In what we have to share.

Odes by Hölderlin: Return to the Homeland

Your mild air lifting! Heralds of Italy!

   Replete with your poplar trees, beloved stream!

      Your swaying mountain! All of your one

         Sunlit summit, so have you come again?

You silent place! If in dreams you seemed distant

   After the day grew more hopeless with longing,

      You are my mansion, and companion,

         Trees of the hilltop, you the familiar!

How long it has been, how long! The dormant child

   Is gone, and gone is youth and love and desire;

      But you, my fatherland, are holy -

         Long suffering one! See, you have remained.

And therefore they suffer alongside of you,

   Your friends, their costly teacher! Your servants too,

      Who wander and stray, when far away

         And reminded in dreams they’re unfaithful.

And when in the feverish breast of the young

   The capricious wishes are mollified and

      Stilled before destiny, thus they are

         Made dearer to you because purified.

Goodbye then, days of youth, your path of the rose

   That loves, and all of your wayfarer pathways,

      Farewell! And capture my life again,

         O heaven of the homeland, in blessing!

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

Rückkehr in die Heimat

Ihr milden Lüfte! Boten Italiens!

   Und du mit deinen Pappeln, geliebter Strom!

      Ihr wogenden Gebirg! o all ihr

         Sonnigen Gipfel, so seid ihrs wieder?

Du stiller Ort! in Träumen erschienst du fern

   Nach hoffnungslosem Tage dem Sehnenden,

      Und du mein Haus, und ihr Gespielen,

         Bäume des Hügels, ihr wohlbekannten!

Wie lang ists, o wie lange! des Kindes Ruh

   Ist hin, und hin ist Jugend und Lieb und Lust;

      Doch du, mein Vaterland! du heilig –

         Duldendes! siehe, du bist geblieben.

Und darum, daß sie dulden mit dir, mit dir

   Sich freun, erziehst du, teures! die Deinen auch

      Und mahnst in Träumen, wenn sie ferne

         Schweifen und irren, die Ungetreuen.

Und wenn im heißen Busen dem Jünglinge

   Die eigenmächtgen Wünsche besänftiget

      Und stille vor dem Schicksal sind, dann

         Gibt der Geläuterte dir sich lieber.

Lebt wohl dann, Jugendtage, du Rosenpfad

   Der Lieb, und all ihr Pfade des Wanderers,

      Lebt wohl! und nimm und segne du mein

         Leben, o Himmel der Heimat, wieder!

The Wind of Distant Sirens

The crack of palms in crisp gusts
The kind of day where you move
Without question

And all the directions
Merge into one
Triumphal chaos

As if all the micro
Discernments adjustments
And judgments were wrong

No longer a thought for what is
And what is not
In the powder blue sky

Even the slightest hesitation
Against the inexplicable
Seems to defy the will of God

At the Eurythmy Recital

On the ground of wonder,
Where we train our souls to art,
The music talks in circles,
It cannot offer anything
Except what we want to hear:
The town square with all its lamps,
But not what's inside the windows,

The conjuring bow
Like a second sun
Focused on heroics, noble
Dreams, faces that glow,
What disappears in the flicker
Of its feather whiskers
In vaporous shadow

One wants so much more:
To fill in the echoes
But all we can fill in is the sound
With imagined notes from
Remembered instruments,
Maybe to see the music's dissonance,
As if it was invisible.

Stevens Textplication #38: Bantams in Pine-Woods

“But I am, in any case, / A most inappropriate man / In a most unpropitious place,” reported Stevens in “Sailing After Lunch,” a rare glimpse inside the personal life of the great poet. The same feeling is evoked in “Bantams in Pine-Woods” from 1922. It’s not exactly a confessional poem, but the amount of self-disclosure in these ten mad-cap lines opens up a fresh view of Stevens that is often lost when a writer is safely feted and dead. Put your seat belts on, here’s the poem:

Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan

Of tan with henna hackles, halt!

Damned universal cock, as if the sun

Was blackamoor to bear your blazing tail.

Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat! I am the personal.

Your world is you. I am my world.

You ten-foot poet among inchlings. Fat!

Begone! An inchling bristles in these pines,

Bristles, and points their Appalachian tangs,

And fears not portly Azcan nor his hoos.

This is a difficult poem to explicate, because it makes, despite the large proportion of nonsense words, such complete sense explanations seem counter-productive. But I only have to go as far as the Wikipedia entry on this poem to be reminded that the gulf between poet and reader in Stevens is always vast. In fact, the reading of the poem from Stevens’ most esteemed readers is so much opposed by the actual poem, it’s instructive to paste the entire interpretation (as of 6/1/18 at least) here:

This poem can be read as a declaration of independence for American poetry. The new world's "inchling" poets are defiant towards the traditional literary canon, and particularly defiant against the unnamed, arrogant, self-appointed gatekeeper of literary tradition; they are confident instead in their own free powers of innovation in the New World. The poem can be compared to "The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage" on Helen Vendler's interpretation of it as an expression of confidence in new American art. On this reading Chieftain Iffucan represents the canon, making a claim to universality and a privileged access to inspiration that is challenged by the Appalachian inchlings. The richness of tradition is conceded ("Fat!...."), but it is relativized ("Your world is you"). Nevertheless, a single poet is addressed but not identified in the poem; the possibility that that poet is T. S. Eliot, who emigrated from the New World to the Old World, problematizes whether the "canon" is or is not un-American.

Somehow, I don’t think the critics are just being polite about the ridiculous way the poet presents himself here. The first stanza conjures the spectacle of a grossly obese man wearing a caftan and parading like a ceremonial cock’s comb his red dyed hair (henna was traditionally used to dye hair red, for example by the Pre-Raphaelites). It’s impossible not to point out in this context that Stevens himself had red hair and – shall we say – ample girth. The cheesy play on words of “if you can” and “as can” only heightens the silliness, as if a Boumi hat has been placed on the Chieftain’s head.

The self-deprecation expands in the second stanza, as the sun is compared to a “blackamoor” – a stereotyped depiction of African and Asia servants/slaves by Europeans – to serve this rooster tail of spectacle that is derived from the delusions of the male ego (“damned universal cock”).

The strutting referred to here is obviously of the poetic variety, as our would-be chief, like a crowing cock, displays the ornate images and incessant rhymes that would feed his desire for authority and/or recognition.

But the third stanza wrecks this pretense faster than an ignored diet plan: “Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat!” The seemingly incongruous comeback to this, “I am the personal. / Your world is you. I am my world” suggests that the main character is responding to an attack. What does a poet do when he is accused, as Stevens often was, of being too lush, too stylish, too obscure, too detached from reality? He points out coldly, as here, that all of this makes perfect sense to him, in his world. That it doesn’t register in another world is not, in fact, his concern.

The poem then darkens – and deepens – by making an abrupt shift from self-examination toward outward hostility to him. The ten-foot poet (our Chieftain) is now addressed by someone or something else, an inchling (clear enough in context but, as far as I can tell, a made up word). The twist here is that the inchling, or bantam if you prefer (smaller roosters in contrast to the giant cock), has the power over the giant instead of vice-versa. He is the one who bids him “begone” and dismisses him by not fearing/hearing his owl-like hoos.

Instead, he “bristles” (reacts angrily and defensively as if to a grave offense, with hair stood on end) and the associated they “point their Appalachian tangs,” the latter word not only connoting the sound of a strong accent but also a literal knife that vows to cut up his work to ribbons. Indeed, if everyone inhabits different worlds, as suggested in the earlier stanza, the lack of commerce between the giant and the inchling gives the power to the inchling.

It is that sense of just how much power ignorance wields that lifts this up from what would be a standard – albeit strangely worded – retort to one’s critics. We are taught – generally – that there are “great” writers who “rise to the top” by subjecting their “genius” to the “tempering” of multiple, critical readings. This poem shows an altogether contradictory experience, where illiterate and venomous mediocrities routinely destroy poetic geniuses and their work, as if that is the natural order of things.

Comically, such an end is fitting for our Azcan, who finds he has far less power and influence that he had egoistically led himself to believe. More seriously, it should also prompt a sense of cognitive dissonance in the reader, who would likely hold on to the belief despite the evidence that his/her reading list has been pre-screened by reputable readers. Ah, but that’s the beauty of separate worlds! They have such rich, open possibilities.

Chronologies with Stevens are often speculative, but this poem appears to have been composed around the same time as “The Comedian as Letter C,” an epic foray into romantic illusion that was itself a rewrite of an equally epic “From the Journals of Crispin.” This earlier piece had been composed for and submitted to some literary contest hand-picked by Stevens’ friends. Unfortunately, the poem did not win, or even place. This apparently hit Stevens hard, as he threw the entire manuscript in the trash when it was returned. Some enterprising neighbor rescued it, held onto it for decades without Stevens’ knowledge, and finally released it to the scholarly circuit, where it eventually appeared in Opus Posthumous.

That background suggests a possible real-life inspiration for “Bantams in Pine-Woods.” Poets dependent on publication to be read (or not read, as the case often is) feel perhaps more keenly than other artists the hegemony that critics and literary gatekeepers have over their work. It’s some comfort that someone as great as Stevens experienced it and kept his humor intact.

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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.