Poems in the Manner Of by David Lehman

Author:David Lehman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

In my college years and for several decades after, Wallace Stevens was the poet laureate of the baccalaureate—the favorite of professors, perhaps because he proposed that in the absence of a divinity, the imagination was “supreme.” The logic made existence itself seem an aesthetic proposition.

Poem in the Manner of Wallace Stevens

Not until the days of unrelenting sky,

the water cool, the lily pads on the pond

green with the slime of the deep, did I

note the versions of sea that compound

a surface of blue with the white of foam

or a white bird leaving its native home

that may not exist in an icy haze

if winter comes and, with a boy’s courage,

a man walks alone on the shore

between the early yellow of an old marriage

and his first idea of that leafless world,

that giant’s view of night’s midwinter blaze

where a man and a woman might walk,

might talk, yet neither says a word,

or no one’s there except that white bird.

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