Another Poem Written at Morning
for Wallace Stevens
We always were
as different as two things can possibly be
as far apart as a white bear on an ice floe
from a neon flamingo preening on one leg
or a thinking mouse in a live trap
from the distant hawk that stoops.
We always were
as close as two feathers nesting in
coralpink scales on that same flamingo,
as mouse and thought,
as the freeze of boreal ice
to the bear's shaman paw.
When all there was to read
was ratscratch and pigeon droppings,
you'd already written for me
the encyclopedia of myself;
Go on through the darkness, you said
The waves fly back.
When my only drawing was child's
chalkdust, fumbling baroque intricacy into
crude streaks, you painted my adjectives in oils
with the extravagant precision of a Poussin,
carved from cloud within the sister, mother and
diviner lover, out of our own imperfections wrought.
Ever you were truer to me than any breathing man.
Even now in the room where the interior paramour
lights the highest candle, begins the twilight music,
I bend in the dance with your businessman's stone
in its calico gypsy shirt and cobweb shoes,
still try to read your book of granite mossed
with shadows, sudden lightning burst over
inkblack seas pounding meaning
in constant making and unmaking,
whispers calling, fill the four corners of night
flutter your empty sleeves,
it's the spirit that we seek,
ask often. No matter if answering is all reflection,
dimmer, poorer through prosthetic eyes;
let them shine and serve, let the wench's tongue wag,
if only in echoes softer than tumbled shells suspiring
on a ghost beach, because you gave not killing order
but the idea of order
that grew the garden that saved me
from the domination of black, sent
dreams of baboons and periwinkles,
put peacocks in the
heavy darkness of hemlock,
rejoiced in green curls.
February 2012
Reposted for Meeting the Bar: Literary Allusion at dVerse Poets Pub
Victoria is hosting today and this poem seemed to fit her challenge to write an answer to another poem, as well as cite a literary influence.
Poem Written At Morning
by Wallace Stevens
A sunny day's complete Poussiniana
Divide it from itself. It is this or that
And it is not.
By metaphor you paint
A thing. Thus, the pineapple was a leather fruit,
A fruit for pewter, thorned and palmed and blue,
To be served by men of ice.
The senses paint
By metaphor. The juice was fragranter
Than wettest cinnamon. It was cribled pears
Dripping a morning sap.
The truth must be
That you do not see, you experience, you feel,
That the buxom eye brings merely its element
To the total thing, a shapeless giant forced
Upward.
Green were the curls upon that head.
Italicized words are quotations or titles from Stevens' poems.
this was originally posted for real toads
where
Kenia's challenge was to dialogue with a poem or poet.
