Wallace Stevens -- The Idea of Order at Key West

[syntheticmuse.livejournal.com]

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.
For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.

If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

(no subject)

[silverflurry.livejournal.com]

Essay on Departure

And when you leave, and no one's left behind,
do you leave a cluttered room, a window framing
a zinc roof, other mansard windows? Do you
leave a row of sycamores, a river
that flows in your nocturnal pulse, a moon
sailing late-risen through clouds silvered by
the lights flung up from bridges? Do you leave
the wicker chairs the cafe owner stacks
at half-past-midnight while the last small clutch
of two girls and a boy smoke and discuss
what twenty-year-olds in cafes discuss
past midnight, with no war on here? You leave
the one and then the other, the all-night
eight-aisles-of-sundries with a pharmacy
cloned six times in one mile on upper Broadway.
Everywhere you're leaving something, leaving
no one, leaving as a season fades,
leaving the crisp anticipation of
the new, before its gold drops on the rain-
slick crossings to the walkways over bridges,
the schoolyard's newly painted porte-cochere:
remembered details. You're no longer there.
What's left when you have left, when what is left is
coins on the table and an empty cup?
An August lapse begins; the shutters drop
and lock, whatever follows is conjecture.
The sound feels final, punitive, a trap
shutting its jaws, though when the selfsame structure
was rolled up mornings, it was hopeful noise,
a reprieve from insomnia, a day's
presence opening possibility.
As you leave the place, you bring the time
you spent there to a closed parenthesis.
Now it is part of that amorphous past
parceled into flashes, slide-vignettes.
You'll never know if just what you forget's
the numinous and right detail, the key—
but to a door that is no longer yours,
glimpse of a morning-lit interior's
awakening silhouette, with the good blue
sky reflected on the tall blue walls,
then shadow swallows what was/wasn't true,
shutters the windows, sheathes the shelves in dust,
retains a sour taste and discards the kiss,
clings to the mood stripped of its narrative.
You take the present tense along. The place
you're leaving stops, dissolves into a past
in which it may have been, or it may not
have been (corroborate, but it's still gone)
the place you were, the moment that you leave.

Marilyn Hacker
Poetry
Volume CLXXXI, Number 2
December 2002