MARK STRAND Wallace Stevens Comes Back to Read His Poems at the 92nd Street Y

It was a willfulness, an exertion, which verged

At once on fluency, that I should appear, as I did

Today, out of light-blue air, in a dark-blue suit.

In the time that I have been gone, I never outgrew

The sensation of being, nor for a moment forgot

Which world was mine. I clung to the merest whispers,

The faintest echoes that rose from below. For years,

I lay on a down-filled sofa, alone with my passions.

Bright refrains of endless azure circled

The hours, and filled me with pleasure, but the poems

I wrote were dulled by the sort of calm one feels

In the downward drift of sleep. They never became

The relics of light I wished them to be. In the days

When it could be said I was one of you, I loved

The beyond as somebody only can who is bound

By the earth. All that I wrote was a hymn to desire,

To the semblances and stages of bliss. My poems

Bore only a passing likeness to the life

Of which they were the miraculous part. But when

I was borne among the erasures of heaven I began

To believe that whatever was distant or puzzling could never

Be made too obvious. Of course I was wrong.

I’d allowed myself to be swayed by a vision of plainness

That would have all things turn into one idea.

So much for the past. May the worst of it fall by the wayside

Tonight. May other more intricate powers convene.

May the words that I speak be the ones you hear.

from The New Yorker