Alfred Kreymborg, ed. Others for 1919. 1920.
Wallace Stevens
Pecksniffiana
B
On the palmy beach,
Into the alabasters
And night blues.
Sultry moon-monsters
Are dissolving.
With white moonlight.
To this droning of the surf.
In the sea, Biscayne, there prinks
The young emerald, evening star—
Good light for drunkards, poets, widows,
And ladies soon to be married.
Arch in the sea like tree-branches,
Going in many directions
Up and down.
The thoughts of drunkards, the feelings
Of widows and trembling ladies,
The movements of fishes.
That this emerald charms philosophers,
Until they become thoughtlessly willing
To bathe their hearts in later moonlight,
In the night that is still to be silent,
Reflecting this thing and that,
Before they sleep.
They should think hard in the dark cuffs
Of voluminous cloaks,
And shave their heads and bodies.
Is no gaunt fugitive phantom.
She might, after all, be a wanton,
Abundantly beautiful, eager.
From whose being by starlight, on sea-coast,
The innermost good of their seeking
Might come in the simplest of speech.
That know the ultimate Plato,
Tranquillizing with this jewel
The torments of confusion.
Victoria Clementina, negress,
Took seven white dogs
To ride in a cab.
Harness of the horses shuffled
Like brazen shells.
By the green lake-pallors,
She too is flesh,
Netted of topaz and ruby
And savage blooms;
In a golden sedan,
White dogs at bay.
Except linen, embroidered
By elderly women?
The white cock’s tail
Tosses in the wind.
The turkey-cock’s tail
Glitters in the sun.
The wind pours down.
The feathers flare
And bluster in the wind.
I’m ploughing on Sunday,
Ploughing North America.
Blow your horn!
Ti-tum-tum-tum!
The turkey-cock’s tail
Spreads to the sun.
Streams to the moon.
Water in the fields.
The wind pours down.
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.
I
But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four hills and a cloud.
Reading where I have written,
“The spring is like a belle undressing.”
The singer has pulled his cloak over his head.
The moon is in the folds of the cloak.
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.
But not on a shell, she starts,
Archaic, for the sea.
But on the first-found weed
She scuds the glitters,
Noiselessly, like one more wave.
And would have purple stuff upon her arms,
Tired of the salty harbors,
Eager for the brine and bellowing
Of the high interiors of the sea.
Blowing upon her hands
And watery back.
She touches the clouds, where she goes,
In the circle of her traverse of the sea.
In the scurry and water-shine,
As her heels foam—
Not as when the goldener nude
Of a later day
Will go, like the centre of sea-green pomp,
In an intenser calm,
Scullion of fate,
Across the spick torrent, ceaselessly,
Upon her irretrievable way.