How can the sun accept such sadness?

Like the desert dirt – useless –

Finds room for its own – lizards.

The sticks have become bones.

The tumbleweeds wait like haystacks – rough

Becoming – the bushes shadowed with suffering –

The sporadic green screaming and shuddering –

The bleached out sea of sameness of the hollow trees

Who say “there’s nothing there” as if it’s the wind –

The cactus bulbs like bruises, wasting away,

So small they seem, together in such light –

Lone yellow daisies plea for love with such plangency –

The shade blanket dapples the spikes

While the dry bush glows with intent –

Black seeds repeat the day’s frequencies

In a kind of efflorescent death.

Lower and redder, it’s known now by the thistles

Explosive as twilight,

The leafless tufts dangerous,

The bare trees like blood vessels –

The humps and tracks and ridges come to life

As if to grieve what never was.

Then the sun, as if responding

Turns on a symphony of pity

For all it couldn’t say before,

When it said it all,

What the mountains of blue smoke now repeat

Without even knowing.

Recovering the Other

The mind is unkind,

Parts hearts every day

But souls know to roll that way,

Spirits play,

Refreshed in death’s breath

Between life’s strife,

Where what you knew isn’t true

And what you felt melts,

The you who knelt before the blues

Becomes the you who grew

By choosing shoes for new losing

Along the avenues of clues,

Going there to share,

And wear your caring stare,

So the universal brain cell can tell you

Your song is wrong,

Your touch too much, the crying

Nebula eye you rely on a lie.

Everything divides

So the other side can be pried,

The guide tried,

The decider elided,

The larger than life

Brought down to size

So it may rise

More wise next time.

Thus the sublime rhymes

Like breeze through the trees,

The invisible available to feel,

From the unassailable real.

How else could we comprehend?

How thought never comes to an end …

Gray Commute

The white sea appears through gray shapes

As the homeless come first to the streets

Bearing well-stocked carts and a wave

And a name to one another like businessmen

At elevators.

One would think that they’d be free

Of obligation’s evening animosities

But they barely can look upon the world

As it is opened, or the sun as it peeks

Through a wool lapel.

Out of the smoke of hidden motors

The workers come out holding thermos’s

From the secret treatment plant, dazed

From the all-night lightbulbs nestled in the

Rebar and 2 by 4 frames.

Temporaries, pulled from lines, are gathered

Into circles like bonfires for assignment,

They shake their feet and tilt their heads

As if listening to anything in the foreman’s instruction

But the ring of lucre.

The headlights slowly stutter down the hill,

The colors they have can't compete with the gray

Of highway and sky; meanwhile, the lateness

Of the train and the pallor of the hour

Knits furrows onto platform faces.

A curtain of light falls through the clouds,

And a bluetoothed salesman begs a client

To not hang up by holding himself hostage

Pleading all the things he will do and say

To make the day not wasted.

The sky is as metallic as the containers

Where more, in hordes, submit

To the molds that require the mind

To be wound and unwound like clocks to chase

The moments at a distance.

Though the data to extract and condense
Will never relent, they are so slow to act,

Resistant at every step, as they tighten

Their straps, fasten bags, and fidget

Gnashing until dark,

Lost inside and fumbling for each other’s arms,

Which become, as easily as the sun is released,

Something real, not just to be desired, but

As needed as the tracks that bolt

Uncooperative wires for spark.

Billboard on Hill

The wind that whisks the people through the city

Fills their heads with thoughts as well,

The tenuous and discontinuous

Multi-tasked facts, spontaneous conjecture,

Memories conveniently retrieved

And inconclusively released ...

The wind must cultivate these reveries 

In the moment before they flee

As if a needle dropped in the spin

Would reveal a symphony,

But there’s only the bluster of the wind

And the face of Dudamel like an archon.

Mulch

The long slow ride, from being an alien
          to becoming a suburban-ite,
what changes is
          you no longer need a home,
the illusion of connection traded
          for the one of sameness;

the all-consuming eye
         that lays waste to life
And takes what it calls
         excitement
now fertilizes smaller plots, cultivates
        a more mannered death.

Negotiations between weeds
         and blossoms
in a long-term engineering project
         to turn toads into frogs
(as if a childhood imagined through
        could be recalled, much less used);

what you imagine now
        becomes much smaller,
that the people who love you
        won't leave,
Though they always
        do.

The lonely dog beyond the backyard
        howls and howls,
that is your perfection,
        only marred
by the pause it takes to listen
        for a response.

Pruning

I kill the vines of life, that move

their Fibonacci curls across the branches

so elusively, as to different worlds.

When I unwound their lustrous strands, they went on

to infinity; it takes that much to kill the host     

– the line of death and life so close.

They’ve become the rooted things who’ve earned some sun

and produce real stems and fronds; they’re like their only

friends, in fact, what they are slowly assassinating,

with blooms that mourn and say it’s all for the best.

To rip them out as if they don’t deserve their life,

to save, we say, a life, is more savage than we know –

the sounds of Hanna’s piano float, as the alms

of green entanglements are carried without grief

to a new death – compost – purposed for rebirth.

Harmonic 9ths, like vines, may find a way to connect

– if only in the mind – but will always find the crying

that’s best left unexpressed – it’s kind to call it closure.

Some Lines

Back to the thinking

    ocean

with its crossing paths,

its peaks and drops,

currents that override

    evolving formulas,

that fractions the roots

    and turns back

             into furrows

in a relentless balancing

that shudders with implications

             as the nerves

             branch out

in circles and curves,

v-shapes and triangulars,

sacred parallelogram

    circuits

that form and dissolve

in continuous churn

of mind comprehending

            and building

translucent arcs of force

to shatter like stones

           in the discovery

of impermanence

as a breath of endless

           iteration

where everything tangible

           yields

and everything spiritual

           bends to a shape

repeated in patterns

           that multiply

           and spiral away,

some frothy creator’s

           pure joy,

manifestation’s gateway,

how much can

          suddenly

          exist in

a moment

that was

          unconceived,

          inconceivable

through the entire

historical flow.

Stevens Textplication #47: The Virgin Carrying a Lantern

And so we come to the last poem in this series, the last one Stevens wrote for his first book of poems, Harmonium. It would be another eight years before Stevens wrote again with any consistency, and he returned like a soldier from a war a very different poet: emotionally raw, deeply skeptical, focused on the singular quandary of where reality (the other) ends and imagination (the self) begins. That gives his later poems a lucidity and depth that is only hinted at in the strange and mannered poems we’ve covered here, which, for all their renown and panache, require some type of interpretative apparatus to fully feel. Thus, for both poet and explicator, “The Virgin Carrying a Lantern,” this last of Stevens’ apprentice poems, carries the air of “a farewell duty” to wrest light from obscurity. Here, from 1923, is the poem:

There are no bears among the roses,
Only a negress who supposes
Things false and wrong

About the lantern of the beauty
Who walks, there, as a farewell duty,
Walks long and long.

The pity that her pious egress
Should fill the vigil of a negress
With heat so strong!

Stevens employs an uncharacteristically strict verse form here: a rhyming scheme of aab ccb ddb, unusual 4-stress, 9 beat iambic couplets, with a final four beat line in each stanza that is also rigorously followed. This construction makes the poem lighter on its feet than the others in Harmonium, just as the supportive framework it provides for interpretation doesn’t bear perhaps its customary hard lean.  

But Stevens still does a lot within these constraints. The storyline is straightforward enough: A virginal, soon-to-be bride takes one last stroll alone at night with a lantern, but cannot properly consummate this final, exiting duty of her maidenhood because she still longs – despite her lamp – to see what is out there in the dark. The sexual overtones are palpable, from the dangerous bears that hide in the feminine roses to the conflation of heat and darkness as sexual desire in the virgin’s mind.

As suggestive as this depiction is, the wording of the poem is ambiguous enough to support an even more suggestive reading. Specifically, the negress and virgin could be read as two distinct people. In that alternative, the African-American servant watching the bride-to-be as a vigil is the storyline, and her desire for the virgin is what generates the heat. Imagine how perverse that variant of the virginal female trope would have seemed in the 1920s!

Closer reading, however, does not support this second interpretation. Only in the first reading would be possible Stevens’ clever play on the term “negress” as either (or both) a beautiful virgin of color and a figure who only appears to be black because she is behind the lantern in the dark. Similarly, it’s tortured to read “a negress who supposes / Things false and wrong / About the lantern of the beauty” as referring to the negress making a negative judgment about the lantern the virgin is carrying. Is illumination “false and wrong”? But the virgin could easily suppose “things false and wrong” about / around the lantern she's seeing from, because everything is dim, provoking fear and uncertainty.

One of the more interesting theories about this poem came from L.B. Keneally of North Texas State University in the spring 1978 edition of the Wallace Stevens Journal. He believed the poem based on the Biblical account of Jephthah and his daughter in Judges 11:29-40:

Jephthah had vowed to Yahweh that if victory in battle were given to him, he would offer up as sacrifice the first thing that greeted him when he returned home. His only child, a daughter, ran to greet him. Despite the fact that the Hebrews as a group had outlawed human sacrifice, the daughter agreed to allow her father to fulfill his oath. She placed one condition on her consent however, that she be "free for two months" to "go and wander in the mountains, and with my companions bewail my virginity." She walks, as did Stevens' woman, "as a farewell duty."

If Jephthah's daughter and Stevens' virgin are the same, then the" duty" referred to in the modern poem becomes a little clearer. The virgin ["Walks long and long" -- wanders for two months – before she] must bid farewell to life. [p. 49]

That interpretation would also clarify the heat referred to at the end as “the burnt offering” referenced in the Bible verse. It would also support the use of “egress” [meaning exit] and “vigil” [with its connotations of religious observance], and even the use of the term “negress” to denote an appropriately dark-skinned biblical character.

Scanning the poem as a gloss on that bible story, the bears and beasts are not a threat to the rose virgin, for she must confront the dark plans (“false and wrong”) of her fellow humans (and ultimately God). What she sees with her lantern is only a reflection of the grief she otherwise experiences, not the actual external world. The darkness outside is a darkness within. That’s because her true witnessing of life is a leaving. That’s the pity. Death is the mother of beauty indeed.

Red Days of August

My life is not my own;

It's for other people,

But not necessarily

The same other people

I want it to be for:

The hangdog losers, not

The soupkitchen victims;

The lords of my time,

Not the elusive fool

I chase down like leaves for amusement.

I whine but

I’ll think what I’m told to,

Be guilted into carrying 

Some overindulged brat’s shit

As if it was luggage – and I was a porter.

Still, summer and its fire

Never quite softens

Enough to feel good

About the hand on the back

Of the neck pushing forward

As the future fills up

With requests and to-do’s

From increasingly shadowy figures

And my only question is what

Would be the cost in walking away?

But the ones I seek, those neglected

Innocents carved out of sunshine,

Won’t meet the light in my eyes half-way

Unless I’ve attended to the others first:

The deceivers, the demanders, the vampiric.

The sprites always float a few inches away,

Whispering “Please don’t ruin the illusion

For them,” for it’s been a long time growing

In the darkness of their soil

And the tears dropped down in love.

“How is it service

If they deserve it?” They ask, "And

Why do you quibble with father time,

Who bends and stretches you

Like a white summer suit?”

They are amused

I have forgotten

That soon I will wander the cool

Streets again all alone

Looking for any companion.

“You get what you get

When you get it.” The words

Burn, as they peel back any

Illusion that I am what I am

And can be what I’ll be …

So into the dark comes the shards of light,

But I only resent them because

I want to keep sleeping, free

Of doubt, bound by timelessness, 

So easily merged into others,

Instead of having to carry

The simplest truth

Like a new-born chick

Through the enmity

Of enemy territory,

And having to hear 

How loudly someone can

Claim to be me

In a blur of red-brass rims

And tattooed head,

Thus to be judged by myself

Though perfection streams

Through every pore,

Forced to admit I can’t predict

What I know ...

Anger is the inkling

That this scenester here

Instead of being conveniently

Needy and defeated

Is actually a God.

Hanging with the Fly Ash Sunrise

The sky is too painful to look at

– It offered so much hope –

Now it’s death again from above

And we can’t pretend anymore

To be children pulling up daisies

When the war is out in the open

Although few of its victims will look

To see the scars that streak the blue

And those of us who do doubt

There is strength in knowing

Maybe the truth must fester in silence

For all the harm that comes from speaking

Maybe ignorance is the best defense

It’s the devil you know that hurts you

The one you can thank for the pain

You otherwise would not feel

How it sets you apart

From everyone and everything

Makes the way back long

To where you lost yourself

The insanity of being alone

Is in direct proportion to

The astonishing ineluctable divinity

Of your being

It’s long but fulfilling

To lose the heroes you never chose

To learn to stay on friendly terms

With a world that is your enemy

To find the flowers come from your eyes

And not that empty vending cart …

How funny, in that simple shift

No feeling

Has been lost

No compassion sacrificed

The universe of consequence blinked

Not at all

Some Gossip for the Voiceless

The sun shines palladium today
The trees are as metallic as the sky
The cars have come to life
Through some quicksilver trigger
And the living things have settled into stone

All things known have a way of coming undone
Mind fluctuates from black to white
As if one then the other is the whole
'Til what is seen deceives
And what is not
Clamors in the leaves
To be believed

For it is you
Neglected and unrecognized
As if you could exist as simple shadow
A form as on a screen folded from 3D
A thinking blink of energy
In a bulb without its eye

Odes by Hölderlin: The Shackled Stream

What, wrapped inside you, sleeps and dreams you, young man,  

     And edges the cold shore, long-suffering one,

          And does not regard the source, you, that

               Son of the ocean, to titans a friend?

The messengers of love, who the father sends,

     Do you not know their breath of life in the wind?

          And does the word not reach you, clear from

               Above, sent to you by the waking God?

It sounds, sounds already in his chest, how, since

     He plays in the lap of boulders still, it swells

          In him, then he remembers his own

               Force, its enormity, now he hurries,

The procrastinator, mocking the shackles

     Now, and takes and breaks and throws the broken ones

          Out in anger, in play, here and there

               To the resounding shore, and in that voice

The son of God awakens all the mountains,

     It rouses the forests, it hears the herald

          Shuddering from the distant chasm

               In the joyous again breast of the earth.

The springtime comes; it’s dawn for the newest green;

     But he wanders alongside the immortals;

          For there is nowhere he can stay, once

               Received into the arms of the father.

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

Der gefesselte Strom

Was schläfst und träumst du, Jüngling, gehüllt in dich,

     Und säumst am kalten Ufer, Geduldiger,

          Und achtest nicht des Ursprungs, du, des

               Ozeans Sohn, des Titanenfreundes!

Die Liebesboten, welche der Vater schickt,

     Kennst du die lebenatmenden Lüfte nicht?

          Und trifft das Wort dich nicht, das hell von

               Oben der wachende Gott dir sendet?

Schon tönt, schon tönt es ihm in der Brust, es quillt,

     Wie, da er noch im Schoße der Felsen spielt',

          Ihm auf, und nun gedenkt er seiner

               Kraft, der Gewaltige, nun, nun eilt er,

Der Zauderer, er spottet der Fesseln nun,

     Und nimmt und bricht und wirft die Zerbrochenen

          Im Zorne, spielend, da und dort zum

               Schallenden Ufer und an der Stimme

Des Göttersohns erwachen die Berge rings,

     Es regen sich die Wälder, es hört die Kluft

          Den Herold fern und schaudernd regt im

               Busen der Erde sich Freude wieder.

Der Frühling kommt; es dämmert das neue Grün;

     Er aber wandelt hin zu Unsterblichen;

          Denn nirgend darf er bleiben, als wo

               Ihn in die Arme der Vater aufnimmt.

Translator's Note: How can anything be this beautiful?

New Amsterdam Triptych

I.

The plumes of blue forgiveness open

Their closed blinds – and onto the white lights

Of the City, on rooftops, fluff and tobacco shops,

The Village night of Shih Tzu’s and vintage clothes

Through someone else’s eyes to not see through –

New York turned to California while I was gone,

Cigarbars now organic smoothie sheds, the smell of weed

Replacing that of hoisin.

                                                   Every 5 years one should check in,

As on an old lover, the one you made laugh and thought

That meant they cared. Though lambs now graze to

Gregorian chants by the locked church graves of saints,

And unicycles now have brake lights, Afros are jejeune,
And the Village Voice is nothing but a yard of weeds, 

Not much else has changed; they still complete each other’s 

Sentences, the beard on Peter Cooper’s statue still is

Growing, the Jews for Jesus still are chanting along

With new white folk song protests against white supremacy,

And the old man with the gut bucket still plays for change

On the pallets of a long-defunct gas station.

II.

The same moving, to the same unknown destination

Happens here, where light islands through the trees

Shine on passersby who look any which way but the sky

In a world a few miles away, where hemlocks imbued

With college ivy open for sun from the expressway,

And birds move the light as they dance on the leaves.

The trains skim golden, overgrown green

Satellite towns of leaf and seed, where high-rise strands 

Are lifted by sun, the river uncovered to its silted branches

And fly-whipped fish, its leaves and ripples flowing 

Without a gate but light.

                                               The ancient dappled trees 

Are lines of reasoning that reach to the sun, spread bolts 

Of branches charged with new green thinking, as horizon eaves 

Hang like rotted slabs, and roots unable to loosen 

From sodden banks turn fruit for bracket fungi shelves

That give their smoke to the light, like white-edged strings

Of butterfly wings caught in mid-flap up the bark ...

The sheen of mud ... the shine of berries …

                                                                                What formlessness

Feels like, against the shadows of expression. The white

Glints in winks across the warping water ridges. The pockets

Of light are their own sphere, that joins with what is there, 

Inside river canopies, where capillaries fill the sweeping 

Curve of sky, with its still, equally unreadable calligraphies. 

Eyes at all levels revel in the reveal, though knowledge is 

Patchy and the robe doesn’t touch except as heat. Yet, 

Wherever such light joins, there is beauty.

III.

Waiting for it, on Crosby Street again, where the ghosts

Of the art from the dead who once lived here vie

For no eyes, while pigeons drop from trees on the people

Putting it out there at Washington Square. Here, a man

With mouse shoes and continuous talk tries to catapult his glory

Onto the next passerby, unaware of all who’ve come before,

Who made him what he wants to be.

                                                                    The Manhattan wind

Of mind, once it’s passed through, offers nothing but concrete,

The windows that once saw the crystalline vision of a city

Still see nothing by themselves, but refract back 

Whatever the onlooker brings, and the ateliers 

Still live only in the sound of their pipes, 

And the way their lights turn on and off.

                                                                          The walls outside

Are a stiff impasto palimpsest of the posters of events

Of yore, as if they lived forever, as if the thick black letters

Now on top are memories of nights their magic cast

Its spell … but it was made to be disposable, to be of use

In the endless longing to be seen and known, and the

Endless need to see and know –

                                                            The girl has moved on

To be part of another place that will take her temporarily,

In a flutter of chatter how "she fits, she fits" magnificently

In the center of a world that was created in that moment.

Everything else is history, the rust of water borne from

Tower tanks above; it all exists, like the vokka moon,

The CBD mocha, the skater’s knitwool beanie, to clothe a wound

That isn’t even aware of its own bleeding,

                                                                            So when the gallery

Viper passes by the earnest faces and thoroughly conceived plans

To reach for some amorphous splatter of blood, it’s also of a

Moment that’s already past, so there's no loss of hope, as they look

To the sky for the new, despite endless crushing disappointment

That at the time seemed like a pleasant waste of time,

To exalt something that might just do the impossible,
What we’d never otherwise let it do: Define us
In a way that includes.

A Turn in the Game

The friendly treachery of the other players

Seems to fade away with the realization

I am playing cards with the devil.

No matter how I want the numbers,

Higher or lower, or a conjured suit
Of earth, air, fire or water,

He stands at the table with a smile.

On the final hand, where my opponents stick me

And I see all my schemes go up in flames

I say, finally, “nice game, devil.”

But the scorer informs me

I had won, not lost, the hand,

For my bid was for more than I remembered.

It was then I heard the devil laugh.

Odes by Hölderlin: The Courage of the Poet

{Second Version}

Are you not allied with all there is that’s alive?

     Does your allotment not nourish you in service?

          So only the defenseless

               Walk through life, wholly fearless!

Whatever occurs, all is sanctified to you,

     To be turned into joy! What then would be able

          To antagonize you, heart,

               And come between you and your role?

For, since the song that breathed forth peace was ripped away

     From mortal lips, pious in suffering and bliss,

          Humanity’s melody

               Has pleased our hearts, so we're the same,

The singers of the people, willingly among

     The living, for many things join here joyfully,

          Each one sweet, each one open,

               That’s the way our ancestor, the sun god, who

Begrudges to rich and poor a happy day, is

     In our ephemeral age, the impermanent,

          Erected on a golden

               Cord, as if to hold children, lasts.

Wait for him, and when the time arrives, receive him,

     See his purple flood of tide; go to the noble

          Light, versed in transformation,

               Like-minded spirit, down the path.

And evanesce as well, when it's time, for nowhere

     Does his spirit lack its due, so our happiness

         Dies once in life’s earnestness,

              Gorgeous nevertheless, the death!

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

Dichtermut

Sind denn dir nicht verwandt alle Lebendigen,

     Nährt die Parze denn nicht selber im Dienste dich?

         Drum, so wandle nur wehrlos

               Fort durchs Leben, und fürchte nichts!

Was geschiehet, es sei alles gesegnet dir,

     Sei zur Freude gewandt! oder was könnte denn

         Dich beleidigen, Herz! was

               Da begegnen, wohin du sollst?

Denn, seitdem der Gesang sterblichen Lippen sich

     Friedenatmend entwand, frommend in Leid und Glück

         Unsre Weise der Menschen

          Herz erfreute, so waren auch

Wir, die Sänger des Volks, gerne bei Lebenden,

    Wo sich vieles gesellt, freudig und jedem hold,

          Jedem offen; so ist ja

               Unser Ahne, der Sonnengott,

Der den fröhlichen Tag Armen und Reichen gönnt,

    Der in flüchtiger Zeit uns, die Vergänglichen,

         Aufgerichtet an goldnen

          Gängelbanden, wie Kinder, hält.

Ihn erwartet, auch ihn nimmt, wo die Stunde kömmt,

    Seine purpurne Flut; sieh! und das edle Licht

         Gehet, kundig des Wandels,

          Gleichgesinnet hinab den Pfad.

So vergehe denn auch, wenn es die Zeit einst ist

    Und dem Geiste sein Recht nirgend gebricht, so sterb

         Einst im Ernste des Lebens

          Unsre Freude, doch schönen Tod!

Overheard at City Lights Bookstore

“Excuse me, could you point me in the direction of Jack Kerouac?”

“Of course, ma’am, he’s covering the dry martini waterfront now

Asking the tourist planks ‘where are the squeaking docks,

The rotting crabs, the green ropes of my city? Home of sad

Laundromats, you’ve become as humorless as your emojis!’

He grasps like that at forbidden straws

By the bay’s still turquoise grays,

Storytelling training for the homeless nearby,

And nothing you can do but leave.

“There’s some satisfaction in that, you know,

Like you’ve actually accomplished something.”

Stevens Textplication #46: Two Figures in Dense Violet Light

Two Figures is the third in Stevens’ trilogy of poetic inspiration poems written as he prepared Harmonium for publication in 1923 (after To the One of Fictive Music and Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks). The poem’s suppleness and open-endedness attest to his growth as a poet, sounding more like later, greater Stevens than any of the poems we’ve covered in this series. The artistic problems at the root of this instruction from one mysterious figure to another become, in fact, indistinguishable from the problems of love we all share – specifically the difficulties and possibilities of communication. Holding both meanings in mind when reading the poem deepens its impact:

I had as lief be embraced by the porter of the hotel

As to get no more from the moonlight

Than your moist hand.

Be the voice of the night and Florida in my ear.

Use dusky words and dusky images.

Darken your speech.

Speak, even, as if I did not hear you speaking,

But spoke for you perfectly in my thoughts,

Conceiving words,

As the night conceives the sea-sound in silence,

And out of the droning sibilants makes

A serenade.

Say, puerile, that the buzzards crouch on the ridge-pole

And sleep with one eye watching the stars fall

Beyond Key West.

Say that the palms are clear in the total blue.

Are clear and are obscure; that it is night;

That the moon shines.

The poem starts with an quizzical bang: “I had as lief be embraced by the porter of the hotel / As to get no more from the moonlight / Than your moist hand.” The archaic literary term “as lief” is not in there just to be obscure, but to serve up the first of many double meanings the poem juggles in order to deepen its connotative impact. The speaker here (presumably a female, as the porter presumably is male) would not only readily (the primary meaning of lief) get intimate with the porter rather than be denied all but the “moist hand” of her unresponsive lover, but would view the porter as her true love (the secondary meaning of lief as dear/beloved). The normal human relations are disrupted in this short sentence not only in that a paid servant in a temporary lodging can be seen as essentially equal to one’s permanent beloved, but that what causes the lack of human contact (only a sweaty hand rather than any genuine love) is beyond-human, simply the moon, that ancient cause of love’s suffering, poetic or otherwise.

Hand also has a neat double meaning here, in that porters “lend a hand” to get your bags into the room. The equivalence of the porter’s and figure’s hands suggests that the poet (who also works/toils by hand) did not get as much of a hand in his transformative efforts by the effects of the moonlight.

To mitigate the distance between the figures, the speaker urges the other one to embrace and even channel the extra-human influence: “Be the voice of the night and Florida in my ear.” As a lover would tell her beloved to speak softly and naturally, so the poet tells her muse to bring the music of nature, what is now silent, to her recording ear. But not just any music. The speaker, turning more directive, throws in another double-sided literary term: “Use dusky words and dusky images.” Dusky primarily means “dim,” as at dusk, so the plea here is for poetry that can’t quite be perceived, that can’t perhaps be explained (as we are trying to do here). Alternatively, dusky means “dark-skinned” (often as a pejorative term), suggesting an exotic kind of beauty, as Florida would appear to have to a Northerner, or of a kind of aesthetic beauty (then untraditional) that shows the darkness as a deeper kind of insight into human nature. “Darken your speech,” the speaker concludes, a linguistic if not a practical possibility. The sense is of sunset, where the things that occupy our minds have vanished and the unsayable persists in a state where anything can happen, because that is the nature of the walk through the great mystery the night represents.

“Speak, even,” the speaker continues, “as if I did not hear you speaking, / But spoke for you perfectly in my thoughts, / Conceiving words.” This is both an embodiment of perfect human love and an impossibility. The key term is “as if,” for the speaker does indeed hear, yet finds the other’s attempts to make themselves heard to be somehow excessive, because they want so much to be understood. The speaker (who is, after all, doing all the speaking in the poem) is asking to be permitted to speak for the other, but without promising that it will be an accurate presentation. Indeed, it seems accuracy is less than desirable. What’s desired is some undefined spark of creation that generates words. This is a direct appeal, in other words, for inspiration. The speaker is asking above all to be trusted in the transmission, as if there is still some fragment of human agency that she could hold onto in the onslaught of creation represented by the other.

The speaker compares herself in this process to the night, which “conceives the sea-sound in silence, / And out of the droning sibilants makes / A serenade.” People don’t generally consider the night as creating the sound of the ocean, of course, but it is easy to think why it could be so, since the lack of sight (the duskiness) magnifies the effect of the ocean’s sounds. More to the point, the poet, in carrying the sounds heard, actually creates them (at least as humans perceive it). Note the double meaning here of the repeated “conceive,” create and perceive. The poet does both, with the implication that it is darkness and emptiness that allows her to accurately capture and render the sounds that comprise the poetic experience.

The next (and next-to-last) stanza is even more assertive in its directives: “Say, puerile, that the buzzards crouch on the ridge-pole / And sleep with one eye watching the stars fall / Beyond Key West.” Puerile, seemingly used as a noun but actually a modifier describing the figure addressed, means “childishly silly and trivial.” The speaker wants a particular, child-like kind of experience from her muse. The killer detail of a carrion-eating bird (symbol of death) sleeping on a pole with one eye open on the stars may be a banal, “random” event when experienced, but it can take on in a poetic representation much deeper levels of suggestiveness.

The final stanza, in contrast, asks for a more general truth – and in so doing becomes stumped. “Say that the palms are clear in the total blue,” the speaker asks in apparent confusion, “Are clear and are obscure …” as the reader senses the mind once again kick in to try to define what is being seen, “that it is night …”, even the most basic statement becoming problematic, “That the moon shines.” And we are left where we started, the moonlight, and the ineffable feeling that cannot ever be quite described – what we call poetry.

Taken as a whole, we see the apparently deep communication and connection between the two figures as completely problematic in fact. One doesn’t speak, while the other asserts an exacting set of conditions to speak for the other – or at all. There is intimacy neither in the beginning nor at the end, despite the stated wish that there would be. The situation in fact gets worse, as the lack of any response from the other figure causes whatever spark was there before to be whispered away in the mysteries of moonlit night.

On the other hand, the already present imposition of the other on the speaking figure – the wrong speech, the strong light, the moist hand – allows a more balanced form of interaction – between the lovers, between the poet and the muse – to occur. The one, in stabbing out at only silence and shadows can fill out the picture herself in a kind of communion with the other. What is asked for is, ironically, what is being given. The distance between them becomes then not a cause for despair, but a necessary condition for solitary being to commune with solitary being, things of earth to commune with heaven.

We’ll never know how much a work of art is the sweat of the artist, and how much a gift from the skies, but asking the unanswerable question can be, as here, poignant, sad and sweet. Stevens will become in time a master of wringing all the poetry out of such occasions.

The Beauty of Abuse Amnesia

The fog of what never was
Rolls through the afternoon

The words she used
The gestures she made

My spellbound, powerless rage

It's as if all the thrusts
Were just defenses
With no need to justify now
When the silence is construed as peace

The smoke, though, never cleared

We were as armies called to command
By the orders themselves
Correcting each other in concentric circles
Thinking that any advantage gave power
Instead of more distance

And the reaching to understand
Only an offer of goodbye

I gave you what we shared
The sycamore trees
Greater for being lost to me

Your pictures from the trading post
At the continental divide
When you decided as the snow fell
That the rules didn't suit you
Arrived a century too late
With a last gasp postcard
Of what life could be
If unnamed mistakes weren't made
Decisions unwound
Visions unseen:
An endless ocean
With all the sand I gave you returned

As if with nothing there
I could find you

The thing that you withheld
Now real
Because the mind that created it
Finally believed
You were gone

Political Poem

RIP Jen Moore

The earth is ruled by Titans, who maul and eat the children.

We call ourselves guerillas, who’ll win this war somehow

By staying alive, despite the countless ways they have to kill us.

Everyone is an enemy, everyone. Every channel of public

Communication exists to promote the dismemberment of infants

As the highest embodiment of being human. If, like us,

You disagree, you are shunned, if lucky, or snuffed out, if

Luckier still, or, more likely, dragged through shame parades

Where the entire planet gets to taunt you, even the priests

And rabbis, ministers and imans, who’ll take a break from raping

And sacrificing little boys and girls to say we will go to hell

If we don’t believe their word is God’s. All our friends and families

Have long since turned their backs on us, we are not welcome

At schools, workplaces, restaurants, coffee shops, if we ask, as we 

Must, how many missing children’s bones were found inside the 

Tunnels between the party rooms that honeycomb the cities,

Rescued into slavery by CPS, or bought by the Red Cross, 

The tax-free foundations and the charities that play for pay 

Upon our last human sympathies. Our neighbors may try, out of 

Kindness, to correct us, and say the world is ruled by Satan, 

Haven’t we heard? It’s quite allowed to saw off the face of a girl 

And show it to her as if it’s your own. That's the least, if you want

To be great, that’s expected of you; have you ever even drank

The urine of a rotisseried baby or did you just enjoy the meat?

The blood, the blood, we say, the martyrs most pure and innocent, 

Then the laughter that we are insane, not worthy of community,

A danger that must be medicated with heavy metals, pacified 

With fluoride, watched by the eyes we can't see. We're taken

To therapists, who ask us to say why we feel it’s so wrong

That the people who give us our opinions, the ways we spend
Our money and time, the influences on our young, are themselves,
Through continuous torture, controlled to the final hair of their 

Souls? Why would such a thing even matter to us, they ask,

Is this really only about that man at the library stacks, who

Expressed his love the only way he knew how, by putting his 

Shaking hands inside my pants when I was a boy? 

We don’t have the strength anymore to deny our beliefs,

To go along with a world that treats children like snacks, and

People as extinguishable waste. The Resistance the holds the last

Candle for the dignity of the human race glares at us with disgust
That we exist, as the deepest disgrace, as the force that renders

Life meaningless. But still we must talk – as I do now – something 

Deep inside insists on being perverse, at putting its own survival

And sanity at stake in order to draw more wasted breaths

For a world where to kill is to live.

Late Sun in Ojai

The golden grass shines as if from the inside.

The leaves dance to life. A strange woman greets me

With “back again?” at the familiar place

I’d never seen. The dreamcatcher medicine

Hangs in the courtyard with sentient carvings

And cushions of stone. The stucco walls glow

As if all things will dissolve soon into light.

Every embodied ghost who floats through

Carries with her so many more she might just as well

Be invisible, the turnings of her mind so

Inaccessible, the material just a shell

Like the postcard barber pole, the sourball emporium.

For behind the colonnades, in a greater world

Hierarchies sit by marble pools, and slowly turn

Their boughs of eucalyptus. The sunlight honors

The empty streets, makes the closed Playhouse marquee seem

A gateway to another realm, turns the liquor store

Into a painting. It’s like the luminaries

Have convened inside this silence and stillness,

Which throbs with a promise that the infinite virtue

Of patience will resolve like a mighty chord.

Soliloquy on an Empty Stage

Compassion always pulls me away from the greasepaint
Every sad face in the audience
Needs help to walk the way back

The poetry muse is quite jealous it turns out

Clouds Over the Stacks

Where there's smoke
     there's ocean's
Mocha foam

The hint of flagrant sun
     below
The hyena fur now covering
     the county

Sending holy taupe
     and then the red
Sun descends unloved
     and filled with shame

Stevens Texplication #45: Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks

“Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks” was one of the last poems written for Stevens’ first book of poems, Harmonium. In fact, this 1923 poem was one of only seven (out of 74) that made their first appearance in that volume. As such it has been commented on, with its obscure first-person narrative and obviously poetic symbolism, as an expression of Stevens’ poetic vocation. However, none of the commentary (that I’ve read, at least) captures what makes the ideas and symbols contained in it worthy of expression in a poem. Below, after the poem itself, is an attempt to delineate what makes it uniquely a poem.

               In the moonlight

  I met Berserk,

               In the moonlight

               On the bushy plain.

               Oh, sharp he was

               As the sleepless!

               And, "Why are you red

               In this milky blue?"

               I said.

               "Why sun-colored,

               As if awake

               In the midst of sleep?"

               "You that wander,"

               So he said,

               "On the bushy plain,

               Forget so soon.

               But I set my traps

               In the midst of dreams."

   I knew from this

               That the blue ground

               Was full of blocks

               And blocking steel.

               I knew the dread

               Of the bushy plain,

               And the beauty

               Of the moonlight

               Falling there,

               Falling

               As sleep falls

               In the innocent air.

Readers familiar with Stevens’ tricks will recognize the blue moonlit nighttime as indicative of the imagination (particularly poetic imagination), and the red sun as representative for the too-harsh intrusion of ordinary reality. Thus, at the most basic level, there is a conflict enacted in the poem between imagination and reality, in that the fear evoked by reality almost but not quite ruins the vague but beautiful nighttime world of the imagination.

The real in this fable is a figure named Berserk. Some commentators have noted the Old Norse derivation of this word (which came into English from poet Sir Walter Scott in 1822), beserkir, as the crazed state of frenzy Vikings drove themselves into in order to be ready for battle. Few if any have noted the etymological significance of naming the figure Berserk:

It was anciently believed that the persons who were liable to this frenzy were mysteriously endowed, during its accesses, with another strange body of unearthly strength. If, however, the Berserk was called on by his own name, he lost his mysterious form, and his ordinary strength alone remained. [Thorkelin, "Notes and Queries on the Kristni Saga," Dec. 28, 1850] 

The narrator does precisely that, identifying him by name on his initial meeting. Thus, the supposed power Berserk has is immediately reduced, giving the narrator the ability to see him more clearly, despite the dimness of night. The speaker notices he is sharp, red, sun-colored, polar contrasts to what otherwise populates the night: the sleepy, the blue, the moonlit. More than notice, he bravely confronts the threatening figure by asking him why he stands out so much in the dark.

Berserk’s answer is unexpected: “You that wander … / On the bushy plain / Forget so soon.” The accurate observation of the wanderer/seeker is, in fact, an illusion, created out of forgetting what he once knew. Oblivion created the netherworld of imagination. We may perceive it as real, but it is (as similarly detailed in “Hymn for a Watermelon Pavilion”) nothing more than a dream state, where our only perception of the real is as a dim force opposing us, like the distant sounds of alarms in sleep.

Not to worry. Berserk has a felicitous solution: “I set my traps / In the midst of dreams.” This warrior won’t confront the enemy while sleeping, he won’t even enter the battlefield, but will instead lure the hunted to their doom in their own dream. In other words, reality will track down and kill any attempts to escape by way of imagination.

The remainder of the poem is a reflection on that disclosure. “I knew from this / That the blue ground / Was full of blocks / And blocking steel.”  Certainly the knowledge that undetectable traps were lying in wait no matter where the speaker goes changes his perspective. Reality could at any time destroy the imaginative world. Thus the speaker “knew the dread / Of the bushy plain.”

But he also knew how, as Stevens put it in “Sunday Morning”, “death is the mother of beauty.” The threat made imagination, because more fragile and illusory, more valuable. “The beauty / Of the moonlight / Falling there, / Falling / As sleep falls / In the innocent air.” It poignantly continues to exist, despite living under constant existential threat.

This narrative arc puts the pieces into place in a more-or-less satisfying way, but many troubling questions remain. Why is the real portrayed as a figure of such violence? Why did it enter the supposedly mutually exclusive world of dreams in the first place? Why does it try to sabotage the world of imagination, seemingly for its own good? How is the speaker the only one who seems to know imagination is doomed? And what should we as readers feel about imagination’s defeat?

Answers to these questions emerge when we color in some detail to these shadowy tropes. Berserk is not simply a representation of the real, but of what can be termed the poetic real. Obvious similarities, in the word berserk, to the frenzied state of those in the throes of poetic inspiration have led more than a few commentators to see Berserk as a symbol of poetic abandon. As opposed to the muse of To the One of Fictive Music, he is the wild man poet who imposes his will on the imaginative dreamscape to produce tangible works of art. Without this protean figure, the real world of poetry would forget every epiphany as soon as it woke from its dream. The comparison to the bloodthirsty Vikings, and his calm admission he hunts the sleeping are indications that this poetic presence is complicit in all manner of violence. Imagine that force animating, for example, the poet trying to put together his first volume for the world’s approval: How the words said would subsume those unsaid, the poems written would trample on the ones that came before, the poets who are read would deprive the others of air. The very act of asserting one’s authority is an act of war. That Stevens’ refers directly to the act of publication can be found in the strange term “blocks.” This word has many distinct meanings, of course, but what if it meant a specific one: “a piece of wood or metal engraved for printing on paper or fabric”? Taken literally, that would mean printing one’s poems would be the “trap” that threatens the truly poetic.

This reading localizes the subsequent passage (about knowing the dread on the bushy plain, and the beauty of how the moonlight falls there innocently like sleep) to show – rather than merely say – the value of the poetic state of mind (as opposed to poetry as a form of expression): How vulnerable it is to the outside world, how innocent of human ambition, how it always falls from our understanding as if its truth must escape any encounter with our rapacious minds. The world is full of poetry, as Stevens so often noted. Actual poems and the books that contain them, on the other hand, don’t get the same honor or attention from him (he claimed at one point, in fact, not to read any other poets). This poem beautifully captures Stevens’ wistfulness towards a time when he was not a “working” poet, when the world was free to express itself truthfully, without his trapping filter.

For the reader, it is the sense that true poetry must be invisible that allows us to feel at last how it animates everything. It is of the essence of poetry – preserved poetry that is – to note how the most profound beauty is that which is lost, denied, or behind a veil. The Prince of Peacocks may grab attention by strutting poetic colors, but it is only in the private dark that the beauty can transmute to the divine.

The Sudden Red-Eyed Sun

For Richard Hugo

Now you say you love me, 20 years too late,
When all the brandy snifters have been loaded onto crates
And the fire sky clouds are as yellow and as gray
As your beard back in the day, when you were one
More nonjudgmental, disaffected intellectual
Snoring in the park, and speaking of the white Christ
Paradise where the homeless are the otherness that unites
In gangsnark screaming the differentially equated mean,
But it seemed you were too busy digging
The distinguished indigenous geniuses
Empirically pick through the empire's receptacles
For disingenuous treasures. Who was I?
Just another unhappy suburbanite trying to pretend
My backpack was as worthless as hers,
The woman with the orange hoodie.

But you did kiss me full on the lips, and hugged
Me with all of what little strength you had left,
And I, as unfeeling as a gypsy, walked diagonally
Away, pleased that I let you come that close.
The streets are too soft, the lost too forgiving.
There was nothing in it for me to feel, then,
But the shame you bravely refused to display.
A million steals and a million tales later
I still can't distinguish the real from the true.
Better that than believe nothing means what it says,
That the plans that are made in advance are as foolish
As asking a rich man for change.