- House for Sale
The bed of old Wallace Stevens is less than you’d imagine:Narrow, penitent, predictor of the grand conversion
Unproven. Here he added his own disorderTo current disaster, ting-tang tossing
Through an ever-darkening night,Demarcating lines into twos or threes as if
That alone could provide some semblanceOf an order imagined if not actual. But
Here it is: the object itselfThat seems too short as well as too narrow
To have ever contained such girth and heightEven if by then slackened with age and the despair
That partners it. In the vacant and ordinaryRoom there remains nothing of the occupant,
Not even this cot-like bed, not even a translucentGhost: one alone, warehoused some
Twenty miles south; the latterUp late, up still, wandering in the nearby
Park, pacing off those lines, pacingForth the structure of ideas as the structure of things.
Just how many rivers are there in this world?And how puny the number of names we know. [End Page 119]