-- from "Wallace Stevens" --
It is hard accommodating ourselves to fate.
Though we learn to do so, we learn it late.
The stars keep their distance to console, to placate.
They bring unearthly silences to the hearer,
so rendering her estrangement dearer.
And they acknowledge her in her PM mirror,
into which she gazes as into the weather,
straining after her pleadings flown thither
and pouring forth their addenda on a zither.
And now and then they come to sip at the spillage,
restraining themselves from starry pillage,
peering down on her steeple, into her village,
never minding the burghers – their merits, their faults –
yet keen on their clockwork, which never halts,
setting divisions for their serenade, their waltz.
On Sundays the steeple informs that “God is one!”
Its herald reverberates in thought’s drum.
August defers to September. Now autumn’s come
with attendants that lead it forth into her room.
She wonders if death isn’t like the womb,
substituting “t” for “w” (“t” in tomb).
With words, she knows, it’s easy to be cynical,
hairsplitting, overly rabbinical.
If words don’t match with things, can we be finical?
For things are to words as ears of corn to their shucks;
you pull them apart at their folds and tucks.
Without words to name them, our things are sitting ducks.
We mind the point where one with the other collides;
they come at each other in waves or tides.
Notes on hopeful matches, we record in asides.
And the rift between them causes uneasiness;
their coincidence merely appeases.
To prolong this appeasement, her task is ceaseless.
Finally, this task becomes her home, her Heimat,
and her home is her Word. Can she rhyme it?
She answers in evocations of her climate,
weaving them into an elaborate brocade,
which bristles with the doubts of which it’s made –
both doubts that she’d defy, and the doubts she’d evade.
When its threadings grow over long, she has them cropped.
She has the pigments thinned, the pipings stopped.
For the excesses must be stanched where thought is slopped.
Her search is perpetual for what she would find.
Her search is this storehouse; this room, her mind.
She empties it out, leaving nothing but the rind.
Her poem is a cipher, a sign of the weather.
Rain is alright; though fine weather, better.
She inscribes it in the matter of her letter.
Her poem is a record of her study, her whim –
a mind that fills and empties at the brim,
a scripture of her experience and its hymn.
Her poem is a bulwark against finitude’s brunt,
which enters via the weather her haunt,
gracing the mensuration of evening’s savant.
All things begin and end before they are over;
for Time is a gracious interloper.
She resigns to its leisure her tended covert,
etching on its rind a list of her fading stock.
The stars acknowledge her steeple, her clock,
and the village in which she lived upon this rock.