08-28-2023, 07:30 PM
On First Reading Wallace Stevens
What am I to make of these blue guitars
these ice cream emperors
modernist images from out of Florida seas
torn from inside my thrusting brain
to fall upon the page in front of disbelieving eyes?
I am like a rabbit, tossed back and forth by the clouds.
Yet I persist, through rattapallax and whoo-hoo-hoo
pulled forward by their sound if not their meaning
clusters of the infinite, crossing and uncrossing
my meager intellect, thrilling me
as they leave me far behind in a confusion
of falling leaves and negro cemeteries.
I stumble forward, word by word, poem by poem,
never completely lost but not quite found, shouting ahead
unheard as you march in front of your columns of musical spirits.
But follow I must, until I am turned to dust,
or simply fall unconscious onto your piercing poetics.
What am I to make of these blue guitars
these ice cream emperors
modernist images from out of Florida seas
torn from inside my thrusting brain
to fall upon the page in front of disbelieving eyes?
I am like a rabbit, tossed back and forth by the clouds.
Yet I persist, through rattapallax and whoo-hoo-hoo
pulled forward by their sound if not their meaning
clusters of the infinite, crossing and uncrossing
my meager intellect, thrilling me
as they leave me far behind in a confusion
of falling leaves and negro cemeteries.
I stumble forward, word by word, poem by poem,
never completely lost but not quite found, shouting ahead
unheard as you march in front of your columns of musical spirits.
But follow I must, until I am turned to dust,
or simply fall unconscious onto your piercing poetics.