Garnet Poems: An Anthology of Connecticut Poetry Since 1776

from An Ordinary Evening in New Haven

56 gArnet poems from An Ordinary Evening in New Haven i The eye’s plain version is a thing apart, The vulgate of experience. Of this, A few words, an and yet, and yet, and yet— As part of the never-ending meditation, Part of the question that is a giant himself: Of what is this house composed if not of the sun, These houses, these difficult objects, dilapidate Appearances of what appearances, Words, lines, not meanings, not communications, Dark things without a double, after all, Unless a second giant kills the first— A recent imagining of reality, Much like a new resemblance of the sun, Down-pouring, up-springing and inevitable, A larger poem for a larger audience, As if the crude collops came together as one, A mythological form, a festival sphere, A great bosom, beard and being, alive with age. ii Suppose these houses are composed of ourselves, So that they become an impalpable town, full of Impalpable bells, transparencies of sound, Sounding in transparent dwellings of the self, Impalpable habitations that seem to move In the movement of the colors of the mind, The far-fire flowing and the dim-coned bells Coming together in a sense in which we are poised, Without regard to time or where we are, 57 WAll ACe stevens In the perpetual reference, object Of the perpetual meditation, point Of the enduring, visionary love, Obscure, in colors whether of the sun Or mind, uncertain in the clearest bells, The spirit’s speeches, the indefinite, Confused illuminations and sonorities, So much ourselves, we cannot tell apart The idea and the bearer-being of the idea. iii The point of vision and desire are the same. It is to the hero of midnight that we pray On a hill of stones to make beau mont thereof. If it is misery that infuriates our love, If the black of night stands glistening on beau mont, Then, ancientest saint ablaze with ancientest truth, Say next to holiness is the will thereto, And next to love is the desire for love, The desire for its celestial ease in the heart, Which nothing can frustrate, that most secure, Unlike love in possession of that which was To be possessed and is. But this cannot Possess. It is desire, set deep in the eye, Behind all actual seeing, in the actual scene, In the street, in a room, on a carpet or a wall, Always in emptiness that would be filled, In denial that cannot contain its blood, A porcelain, as yet in the bats thereof. 58 gArnet poems iv The plainness of plain things is savagery, As: the last plainness of a man who has fought Against illusion and was, in a great grinding Of growling teeth, and falls at night, snuffed out By the obese opiates of sleep. Plain men in plain towns Are not precise about the appeasement they need. They only know a savage assuagement cries With a savage voice; and in that cry they hear Themselves transposed, muted and comforted In a savage and subtle and simple harmony, A matching and mating of surprised accords, A responding to a diviner opposite. So lewd spring comes from winter’s chastity. So, after summer, in the autumn air, Comes the cold volume of forgotten ghosts, But soothingly, with pleasant instruments, So that this cold, a children’s tale of ice, Seems like a sheen of heat romanticized. v Inescapable romance, inescapable choice Of dreams, disillusion as the last illusion, Reality as a thing seen by the mind, Not that which is but that which is apprehended, A mirror, a lake of reflections in a room, A glassy ocean lying at the door, A great town hanging pendent in a shade, An enormous nation happy in a style, Everything as unreal as real can be, 59 WAll ACe stevens In the inexquisite eye. Why, then, inquire Who has divided the world, what entrepreneur? No man. The self, the chrysalis of all men Became divided in the leisure of blue day And more, in branchings after day. One part Held fast tenaciously in common earth And one from central earth to central sky And in moonlit extensions of them in the mind Searched out such majesty as it could find. ...