The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (8 page)

That the air was heavy with the breath of these swine,

The breath of turgid summer, and

Heavy with thunder’s rattapallax,

That the man who erected this cabin, planted

This field, and tended it awhile,

Knew not the quirks of imagery,

That the hours of his indolent, arid days,

Grotesque with this nosing in banks,

This somnolence and rattapallax,

Seemed to suckle themselves on his arid being,

As the swine-like rivers suckled themselves

While they went seaward to the sea-mouths.

My titillations have no foot-notes

And their memorials are the phrases

Of idiosyncratic music.

The love that will not be transported

In an old, frizzled, flambeaued manner,

But muses on its eccentricity,

Is like a vivid apprehension

Of bliss beyond the mutes of plaster,

Or paper souvenirs of rapture,

Of bliss submerged beneath appearance,

In an interior ocean’s rocking

Of long, capricious fugues and chorals.

Now, the wry Rosenbloom is dead

And his finical carriers tread,

On a hundred legs, the tread

Of the dead.

Rosenbloom is dead.

They carry the wizened one

Of the color of horn

To the sullen hill,

Treading a tread

In unison for the dead.

Rosenbloom is dead.

The tread of the carriers does not halt

On the hill, but turns

Up the sky.

They are bearing his body into the sky.

It is the infants of misanthropes

And the infants of nothingness

That tread

The wooden ascents

Of the ascending of the dead.

It is turbans they wear

And boots of fur

As they tread the boards

In a region of frost,

Viewing the frost;

To a chirr of gongs

And a chitter of cries

And the heavy thrum

Of the endless tread

That they tread;

To a jangle of doom

And a jumble of words

Of the intense poem

Of the strictest prose

Of Rosenbloom.

And they bury him there,

Body and soul,

In a place in the sky.

The lamentable tread!

Rosenbloom is dead.

The light is like a spider.

It crawls over the water.

It crawls over the edges of the snow.

It crawls under your eyelids

And spreads its webs there—

Its two webs.

The webs of your eyes

Are fastened

To the flesh and bones of you

As to rafters or grass.

There are filaments of your eyes

On the surface of the water

And in the edges of the snow.

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.

In Oklahoma,

Bonnie and Josie,

Dressed in calico,

Danced around a stump.

They cried,

“Ohoyaho,

Ohoo”…

Celebrating the marriage

Of flesh and air.

This is how the wind shifts:

Like the thoughts of an old human,

Who still thinks eagerly

And despairingly.

The wind shifts like this:

Like a human without illusions,

Who still feels irrational things within her.

The wind shifts like this:

Like humans approaching proudly,

Like humans approaching angrily.

This is how the wind shifts:

Like a human, heavy and heavy,

Who does not care.

Elle savait toutes les légendes du Paradis et tous les contes de la Pologne
.

REVUE DES DEUX MONDES

SHE

How is it that my saints from Voragine,

In their embroidered slippers, touch your spleen?

HE

Old pantaloons, duenna of the spring!

SHE

Imagination is the will of things.…

Thus, on the basis of the common drudge,

You dream of women, swathed in indigo,

Holding their books toward the nearer stars,

To read, in secret, burning secrecies.…

That strange flower, the sun,

Is just what you say.

Have it your way.

The world is ugly,

And the people are sad.

That tuft of jungle feathers,

That animal eye,

Is just what you say.

That savage of fire,

That seed,

Have it your way.

The world is ugly,

And the people are sad.

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

As to get no more from the moonlight

Than your moist hand.

Be the voice of 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-sounds in silence,

And out of their droning sibilants makes

A serenade.

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

And sleep with one eye watching the stars fall

Below Key West.

Say that the palms are clear in a total blue,

Are clear and are obscure; that it is night;

That the moon shines.

I am what is around me.

Women understand this.

One is not duchess

A hundred yards from a carriage.

These, then are portraits:

A black vestibule;

A high bed sheltered by curtains.

These are merely instances.

Sister and mother and diviner love,

And of the sisterhood of the living dead

Most near, most clear, and of the clearest bloom,

And of the fragrant mothers the most dear

And queen, and of diviner love the day

And flame and summer and sweet fire, no thread

Of cloudy silver sprinkles in your gown

Its venom of renown, and on your head

No crown is simpler than the simple hair.

Now, of the music summoned by the birth

That separates us from the wind and sea,

Yet leaves us in them, until earth becomes,

By being so much of the things we are,

Gross effigy and simulacrum, none

Gives motion to perfection more serene

Than yours, out of our imperfections wrought,

Most rare, or ever of more kindred air

In the laborious weaving that you wear.

For so retentive of themselves are men

That music is intensest which proclaims

The near, the clear, and vaunts the clearest bloom,

And of all vigils musing the obscure,

That apprehends the most which sees and names,

As in your name, an image that is sure,

Among the arrant spices of the sun,

O bough and bush and scented vine, in whom

We give ourselves our likest issuance.

Yet not too like, yet not so like to be

Too near, too clear, saving a little to endow

Our feigning with the strange unlike, whence springs

The difference that heavenly pity brings.

For this, musician, in your girdle fixed

Bear other perfumes. On your pale head wear

A band entwining, set with fatal stones.

Unreal, give back to us what once you gave:

The imagination that we spurned and crave.

You dweller in the dark cabin,

To whom the watermelon is always purple,

Whose garden is wind and moon,

Of the two dreams, night and day,

What lover, what dreamer, would choose

The one obscured by sleep?

Here is the plantain by your door

And the best cock of red feather

That crew before the clocks.

A feme may come, leaf-green,

Whose coming may give revel

Beyond revelries of sleep,

Yes, and the blackbird spread its tail,

So that the sun may speckle,

While it creaks hail.

You dweller in the dark cabin,

Rise, since rising will not waken,

And hail, cry hail, cry hail.

I

Just as my fingers on these keys

Make music, so the selfsame sounds

On my spirit make a music, too.

Music is feeling, then, not sound;

And thus it is that what I feel,

Here in this room, desiring you,

Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,

Is music. It is like the strain

Waked in the elders by Susanna.

Of a green evening, clear and warm,

She bathed in her still garden, while

The red-eyed elders watching, felt

The basses of their beings throb

In witching chords, and their thin blood

Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna.

II

In the green water, clear and warm,

Susanna lay.

She searched

The touch of springs,

And found

Concealed imaginings.

She sighed,

For so much melody.

Upon the bank, she stood

In the cool

Of spent emotions.

She felt, among the leaves,

The dew

Of old devotions.

She walked upon the grass,

Still quavering.

The winds were like her maids,

On timid feet,

Fetching her woven scarves,

Yet wavering.

A breath upon her hand

Muted the night.

She turned—

A cymbal crashed,

And roaring horns.

III

Soon, with a noise like tambourines,

Came her attendant Byzantines.

They wondered why Susanna cried

Against the elders by her side;

And as they whispered, the refrain

Was like a willow swept by rain.

Anon, their lamps’ uplifted flame

Revealed Susanna and her shame.

And then, the simpering Byzantines

Fled, with a noise like tambourines.

IV

Beauty is momentary in the mind—

The fitful tracing of a portal;

But in the flesh it is immortal.

The body dies; the body’s beauty lives.

So evenings die, in their green going,

A wave, interminably flowing.

So gardens die, their meek breath scenting

The cowl of winter, done repenting.

So maidens die, to the auroral

Celebration of a maiden’s choral.

Susanna’s music touched the bawdy strings

Of those white elders; but, escaping,

Left only Death’s ironic scraping.

Now, in its immortality, it plays

On the clear viol of her memory,

And makes a constant sacrament of praise.

I

Among twenty snowy mountains,

The only moving thing

Was the eye of the blackbird.

II

I was of three minds,

Like a tree

In which there are three blackbirds.

III

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.

It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV

A man and a woman

Are one.

A man and a woman and a blackbird

Are one.

V

I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendoes,

The blackbird whistling

Or just after.

VI

Icicles filled the long window

With barbaric glass.

The shadow of the blackbird

Crossed it, to and fro.

The mood

Traced in the shadow

An indecipherable cause.

VII

O thin men of Haddam,

Why do you imagine golden birds?

Do you not see how the blackbird

Walks around the feet

Of the women about you?