rabbit as king of the ghosts

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The difficulty to think at the end of day,

When the shapeless shadow covers the sun

And nothing is left except light on your fur--

There was the cat slopping its milk all day,

Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk

And August the most peaceful month.

To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time,

Without that monument of cat,

The cat forgotten in the moon;

And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light,

In which everything is meant for you

And nothing need be explained;

Then there is nothing to think of. It comes of itself;

And east rushes west and west rushes down,

No matter. The grass is full

And full of yourself. The trees around are for you,

The whole of the wideness of night is for you,

A self that touches all edges,

You become a self that fills the four corners of night.

The red cat hides away in the fur-light

And there you are humped high, humped up,

You are humped higher and higher, black as stone--

You sit with your head like a carving in space

And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.

—Wallace Stevens

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the outlines of being and its expressings

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There were ghosts that returned to earth to hear his phrases,
As he sat there reading, aloud, the great blue tabulae.
They were those from the wilderness of stars that had expected more.

There were those that returned to hear him read from the poem of life,
Of the pans above the stove, the pots on the table, the tulips among them.
They were those that would have wept to step barefoot into reality,

That would have wept and been happy, have shivered in the frost
And cried out to feel it again, have run fingers over leaves
And against the most coiled thorn, have seized on what was ugly

And laughed, as he sat there reading, from out of the purple tabulae,
The outlines of being and its expressings, the syllables of its law:
Poesis, poesis, the literal characters, the vatic lines,

Which in those ears and in those thin, those spended hearts,
Took on color, took on shape and the size of things as they are
And spoke the feeling for them, which was what they had lacked.


–Wallace Stevens
Large Red Man Reading

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wild ducks, people, and distances

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The life of the world depends on that he is

Alive, on that people are alive, on that
There is village and village of them, without regard
To that be-misted one and apart from her.

Did we expect to live in other lives?
We grew used so soon, too soon, to earth itself,

As an element; to the sky as an element.
People might share but were never an element,

Like earth and sky. Then he became nothing else
And they were  nothing else. It was late in the year.
The wild ducks were enveloped. The weather was cold.
Yet, under the migrations to solitude, 

There remained the smoke of the villages. Their fire
Was central in distances the wild ducks could
Not span, without any weather at all, except
The weather of other lives, from which there could

Be no migrating. It was that they were there
That held the distances off: the villages
Held off the final, fatal distances,

Between us and the place in which we stood.


–Wallace Stevens

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