The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (6 page)

To what good, in the alleys of the lilacs,

O caliper, do you scratch your buttocks

And tell the divine ingénue, your companion,

That this bloom is the bloom of soap

And this fragrance the fragrance of vegetal?

Do you suppose that she cares a tick,

In this hymeneal air, what it is

That marries her innocence thus,

So that her nakedness is near,

Or that she will pause at scurrilous words?

Poor buffo! Look at the lavender

And look your last and look still steadily,

And say how it comes that you see

Nothing but trash and that you no longer feel

Her body quivering in the Floréal

Toward the cool night and its fantastic star,

Prime paramour and belted paragon,

Well-booted, rugged, arrogantly male,

Patron and imager of the gold Don John,

Who will embrace her before summer comes.

Out of the tomb, we bring Badroulbadour,

Within our bellies, we her chariot.

Here is an eye. And here are, one by one,

The lashes of that eye and its white lid.

Here is the cheek on which that lid declined,

And, finger after finger, here, the hand,

The genius of that cheek. Here are the lips,

The bundle of the body and the feet.

   .      .      .      .      .      .      .

Out of the tomb we bring Badroulbadour.

In the morning,

The jack-rabbit sang to the Arkansaw.

He carolled in caracoles

On the feat sandbars.

The black man said,

“Now, grandmother,

Crochet me this buzzard

On your winding-sheet,

And do not forget his wry neck

After the winter.”

The black man said,

“Look out, O caroller,

The entrails of the buzzard

Are rattling.”

My candle burned alone in an immense valley.

Beams of the huge night converged upon it,

Until the wind blew.

Then beams of the huge night

Converged upon its image,

Until the wind blew.

The soul, he said, is composed

Of the external world.

There are men of the East, he said,

Who are the East.

There are men of a province

Who are that province.

There are men of a valley

Who are that valley.

There are men whose words

Are as natural sounds

Of their places

As the cackle of toucans

In the place of toucans.

The mandoline is the instrument

Of a place.

Are there mandolines of western mountains?

Are there mandolines of northern moonlight?

The dress of a woman of Lhassa,

In its place,

Is an invisible element of that place

Made visible.

I

I figured you as nude between

Monotonous earth and dark blue sky.

It made you seem so small and lean

And nameless,

Heavenly Vincentine.

II

I saw you then, as warm as flesh,

Brunette,

But yet not too brunette,

As warm, as clean.

Your dress was green,

Was whited green,

Green Vincentine.

III

Then you came walking,

In a group

Of human others,

Voluble.

Yes: you came walking,

Vincentine.

Yes: you came talking.

IV

And what I knew you felt

Came then.

Monotonous earth I saw become

Illimitable spheres of you,

And that white animal, so lean,

Turned Vincentine,

Turned heavenly Vincentine,

And that white animal, so lean,

Turned heavenly, heavenly Vincentine.

Well, nuncle, this plainly won’t do.

These insolent, linear peels

And sullen, hurricane shapes

Won’t do with your eglantine.

They require something serpentine.

Blunt yellow in such a room!

You should have had plums tonight,

In an eighteenth-century dish,

And pettifogging buds,

For the women of primrose and purl,

Each one in her decent curl.

Good God! What a precious light!

But bananas hacked and hunched…

The table was set by an ogre,

His eye on an outdoor gloom

And a stiff and noxious place.

Pile the bananas on planks.

The women will be all shanks

And bangles and slatted eyes.

And deck the bananas in leaves

Plucked from the Carib trees,

Fibrous and dangling down,

Oozing cantankerous gum

Out of their purple maws,

Darting out of their purple craws

Their musky and tingling tongues.

Huge are the canna in the dreams of

X, the mighty thought, the mighty man.

They fill the terrace of his capitol.

His thought sleeps not. Yet thought that wakes

In sleep may never meet another thought

Or thing.… Now day-break comes…

X promenades the dewy stones,

Observes the canna with a clinging eye,

Observes and then continues to observe.

Gloomy grammarians in golden gowns,

Meekly you keep the mortal rendezvous,

Eliciting the still sustaining pomps

Of speech which are like music so profound

They seem an exaltation without sound.

Funest philosophers and ponderers,

Their evocations are the speech of clouds.

So speech of your processionals returns

In the casual evocations of your tread

Across the stale, mysterious seasons. These

Are the music of meet resignation; these

The responsive, still sustaining pomps for you

To magnify, if in that drifting waste

You are to be accompanied by more

Than mute bare splendors of the sun and moon.

What word have you, interpreters, of men

Who in the tomb of heaven walk by night,

The darkened ghosts of our old comedy?

Do they believe they range the gusty cold,

With lanterns borne aloft to light the way,

Freemen of death, about and still about

To find whatever it is they seek? Or does

That burial, pillared up each day as porte

And spiritous passage into nothingness,

Foretell each night the one abysmal night,

When the host shall no more wander, nor the light

Of the steadfast lanterns creep across the dark?

Make hue among the dark comedians,

Halloo them in the topmost distances

For answer from their icy Élysée.

I

In my room, the world is beyond my understanding;

But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four hills and a cloud.

II

From my balcony, I survey the yellow air,

Reading where I have written,

“The spring is like a belle undressing.”

III

The gold tree is blue.

The singer has pulled his cloak over his head.

The moon is in the folds of the cloak.

In the moonlight

I met Berserk,

In the moonlight

On the bushy plain.

Oh, sharp he was

As the sleepless!

And, “Why are you red

In this milky blue?”

I said.

“Why sun-colored,

As if awake

In the midst of sleep?”

“You that wander,”

So he said,

“On the bushy plain,

Forget so soon.

But I set my traps

In the midst of dreams.”

I knew from this

That the blue ground

Was full of blocks

And blocking steel.

I knew the dread

Of the bushy plain,

And the beauty

Of the moonlight

Falling there,

Falling

As sleep falls

In the innocent air.

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.

Take the moral law and make a nave of it

And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,

The conscience is converted into palms,

Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.

We agree in principle. That’s clear. But take

The opposing law and make a peristyle,

And from the peristyle project a masque

Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,

Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,

Is equally converted into palms,

Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,

Madame, we are where we began. Allow,

Therefore, that in the planetary scene

Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,

Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,

Proud of such novelties of the sublime,

Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,

May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves

A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.

This will make widows wince. But fictive things

Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.

Let the place of the solitaires

Be a place of perpetual undulation.

Whether it be in mid-sea

On the dark, green water-wheel,

Or on the beaches,

There must be no cessation

Of motion, or of the noise of motion,

The renewal of noise

And manifold continuation;

And, most, of the motion of thought

And its restless iteration,

In the place of the solitaires,

Which is to be a place of perpetual undulation.

It is with a strange malice

That I distort the world.

Ah! that ill humors

Should mask as white girls.

And ah! that Scaramouche

Should have a black barouche.

The sorry verities!

Yet in excess, continual,

There is cure of sorrow.

Permit that if as ghost I come

Among the people burning in me still,

I come as belle design

Of foppish line.

And I, then, tortured for old speech,

A white of wildly woven rings;

I, weeping in a calcined heart,

My hands such sharp, imagined things.

It comes about that the drifting of these curtains

Is full of long motions; as the ponderous

Deflations of distance; or as clouds

Inseparable from their afternoons;

Or the changing of light, the dropping

Of the silence, wide sleep and solitude

Of night, in which all motion

Is beyond us, as the firmament,

Up-rising and down-falling, bares

The last largeness, bold to see.

Two wooden tubs of blue hydrangeas stand at the foot of the stone steps.

The sky is a blue gum streaked with rose. The trees are black.

The grackles crack their throats of bone in the smooth air.

Moisture and heat have swollen the garden into a slum of bloom.

Pardie! Summer is like a fat beast, sleepy in mildew,

Our old bane, green and bloated, serene, who cries,

“That bliss of stars, that princox of evening heaven!” reminding of seasons,

When radiance came running down, slim through the bareness.

And so it is one damns that green shade at the bottom of the land.

For who can care at the wigs despoiling the Satan ear?

And who does not seek the sky unfuzzed, soaring to the princox?

One has a malady, here, a malady. One feels a malady.

The cock crows

But no queen rises.

The hair of my blonde

Is dazzling,

As the spittle of cows

Threading the wind.

Ho! Ho!

But ki-ki-ri-ki

Brings no rou-cou,

No rou-cou-cou.

But no queen comes

In slipper green.

Call the roller of big cigars,

The muscular one, and bid him whip

In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.

Let the wenches dawdle in such dress

As they are used to wear, and let the boys

Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.

Let be be finale of seem.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal.

Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet

On which she embroidered fantails once

And spread it so as to cover her face.

If her horny feet protrude, they come

To show how cold she is, and dumb.

Let the lamp affix its beam.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

I went to Egypt to escape

The Indian, but the Indian struck

Out of his cloud and from his sky.

This was no worm bred in the moon,

Wriggling far down the phantom air,

And on a comfortable sofa dreamed.