January 29, 2006

• New Haven

  

  
  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.

  – Wallace Stevens, opening lines of
      “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”

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