The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (2 page)

I.     
Tom McGreery, in America, Thinks of Himself as a Boy

II.   
The Westwardness of Everything

The Constant Disquisition of the Wind

The World Is Larger in Summer

Seventy Years Later

The Poem as Icon

Forms of the Rock in a Night-Hymn

Every time the bucks went clattering

Over Oklahoma

A firecat bristled in the way.

Wherever they went,

They went clattering,

Until they swerved

In a swift, circular line

To the right,

Because of the firecat.

Or until they swerved

In a swift, circular line

To the left,

Because of the firecat.

The bucks clattered.

The firecat went leaping,

To the right, to the left,

And

Bristled in the way.

Later, the firecat closed his bright eyes

And slept.

The soul, O ganders, flies beyond the parks

And far beyond the discords of the wind.

A bronze rain from the sun descending marks

The death of summer, which that time endures

Like one who scrawls a listless testament

Of golden quirks and Paphian caricatures,

Bequeathing your white feathers to the moon

And giving your bland motions to the air.

Behold, already on the long parades

The crows anoint the statues with their dirt.

And the soul, O ganders, being lonely, flies

Beyond your chilly chariots, to the skies.

The lilacs wither in the Carolinas.

Already the butterflies flutter above the cabins.

Already the new-born children interpret love

In the voices of mothers.

Timeless mother,

How is it that your aspic nipples

For once vent honey?

The pine-tree sweetens my body

The white iris beautifies me
.

But not on a shell, she starts,

Archaic, for the sea.

But on the first-found weed

She scuds the glitters,

Noiselessly, like one more wave.

She too is discontent

And would have purple stuff upon her arms,

Tired of the salty harbors,

Eager for the brine and bellowing

Of the high interiors of the sea.

The wind speeds her,

Blowing upon her hands

And watery back.

She touches the clouds, where she goes

In the circle of her traverse of the sea.

Yet this is meagre play

In the scrurry and water-shine,

As her heels foam—

Not as when the goldener nude

Of a later day

Will go, like the centre of sea-green pomp,

In an intenser calm,

Scullion of fate,

Across the spick torrent, ceaselessly,

Upon her irretrievable way.

First Girl

When this yokel comes maundering,

Whetting his hacker,

I shall run before him,

Diffusing the civilest odors

Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers.

It will check him.

Second Girl

I shall run before him,

Arching cloths besprinkled with colors

As small as fish-eggs.

The threads

Will abash him.

Third Girl

Oh, la … le pauvre!

I shall run before him,

With a curious puffing.

He will bend his ear then.

I shall whisper

Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals.

It will undo him.

Her terrace was the sand

And the palms and the twilight.

She made of the motions of her wrist

The grandiose gestures

Of her thought.

The rumpling of the plumes

Of this creature of the evening

Came to be sleights of sails

Over the sea.

And thus she roamed

In the roamings of her fan,

Partaking of the sea,

And of the evening,

As they flowed around

And uttered their subsiding sound.

At night, by the fire,

The colors of the bushes

And of the fallen leaves,

Repeating themselves,

Turned in the room,

Like the leaves themselves

Turning in the wind.

Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks

Came striding.

And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

The colors of their tails

Were like the leaves themselves

Turning in the wind,

In the twilight wind.

They swept over the room,

Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks

Down to the ground.

I heard them cry—the peacocks.

Was it a cry against the twilight

Or against the leaves themselves

Turning in the wind,

Turning as the flames

Turned in the fire,

Turning as the tails of the peacocks

Turned in the loud fire,

Loud as the hemlocks

Full of the cry of the peacocks?

Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?

Out of the window,

I saw how the planets gathered

Like the leaves themselves

Turning in the wind.

I saw how the night came,

Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks

I felt afraid.

And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time

To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think

Of any misery in the sound of the wind,

In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land

Full of the same wind

That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

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.

The going of the glade-boat

Is like water flowing;

Like water flowing

Through the green saw-grass,

Under the rainbows;

Under the rainbows

That are like birds,

Turning, bedizened,

While the wind still whistles

As kildeer do,

When they rise

At the red turban

Of the boatman.

“Mother of heaven, regina of the clouds,

O sceptre of the sun, crown of the moon,

There is not nothing, no, no, never nothing,

Like the clashed edges of two words that kill.”

And so I mocked her in magnificent measure.

Or was it that I mocked myself alone?

I wish that I might be a thinking stone.

The sea of spuming thought foists up again

The radiant bubble that she was. And then

A deep up-pouring from some saltier well

Within me, bursts its watery syllable.

II

A red bird flies across the golden floor.

It is a red bird that seeks out his choir

Among the choirs of wind and wet and wing.

A torrent will fall from him when he finds.

Shall I uncrumple this much-crumpled thing?

I am a man of fortune greeting heirs;

For it has come that thus I greet the spring.

These choirs of welcome choir for me farewell.

No spring can follow past meridian.

Yet you persist with anecdotal bliss

To make believe a starry
connaissance
.

III

Is it for nothing, then, that old Chinese

Sat tittivating by their mountain pools

Or in the Yangtse studied out their beards?

I shall not play the flat historic scale.

You know how Utamaro’s beauties sought

The end of love in their all-speaking braids.

You know the mountainous coiffures of Bath.

Alas! Have all the barbers lived in vain

That not one curl in nature has survived?

Why, without pity on these studious ghosts,

Do you come dripping in your hair from sleep?

IV

This luscious and impeccable fruit of life

Falls, it appears, of its own weight to earth.

When you were Eve, its acrid juice was sweet,

Untasted, in its heavenly, orchard air.

An apple serves as well as any skull

To be the book in which to read a round,

And is as excellent, in that it is composed

Of what, like skulls, comes rotting back to ground.

But it excels in this, that as the fruit

Of love, it is a book too mad to read

Before one merely reads to pass the time.