A Repetition of Inconstancy

A response to Wallace Stevens’s

“Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”

The merely going round . . .

  We are as we are   Just an abstraction   This idea of being   And what it is to be   Exhilarated to feel, to think   Each a fresh transformation   Abstraction blooded

. . . until merely going round . . .

  We are pierced by nonsense   To have strange relations   To discover desire   To place ourselves   To know our sleep   And the freshness of ourselves   Purest in the heart

. . . is the final good.

  The first idea was not our own   Stripped of all fictions   But that of the absolute   To find what is real   The certainty of definitions   The dependency of opposites   Poems that never reach words

This foundling of the infected past.