And here's a more recent poem.
I began writing it last summer.
And about halfway through, I realized
that it was too late to be writing the poem.
It's called "In Memory of Wallace Stevens."
And he had been dead 14 years already.
I was just getting around to paying my tribute.
But I went ahead anyhow.
And him being slow and ancient--
Well, no, I won't say anything more about it.
"In Memory of Wallace Stevens," part one,
"Hartford is cold today but no colder for your absence.
The rain is green over Avon and since your death,
the sky has been blue many times with a blue you did not
imagine.
The judges of Key West sit soberly in black but only
because it is their accustomed garb.
And to see things with the same voice still
neither serious nor sorry, the walls past
which you walked in your white suit ponderous,
pondering French pictures, are no less vivid now.
Not one is turned to the wall.
The actuarial tables are not upset.
The mail travels back and forth to Ceylon as before.
The gold leaf peels in season and is renewed.
And there are heroes who falter but do not fall or fall
without faltering and without fault.
But you were not one of them.
Nevertheless, the poet practicing his scales
thinks of you as his thumbs slip clumsily under and under,
avoiding the darker notes."
Part two, "The 'the' has become an 'a'.
The dictionary closed at dusk along with the zoo in the park
and the wings of the swans are folded now
like the sheets of a long ladder.
Who borrows your French words and postures now?"
Part three, "The opera of the gods is finished
and the applause is dying.
The chorus will soon be coming down from the clouds.
Even their silence may be understood as a final platitude
of sorts, a summing up.
The tireless dancers have retired at last
to a small apartment on a treeless street.
But, oh, the pas de deux of Eden begins again
on cot springs creaking like the sun and moon.
The operation of the universe is temporarily suspended.
What has been good?
What has been beautiful, the tuning
up or the being put away?
The instruments have nothing more to say.
On plush and velvet they will sleep
until our breath revives them to new flutterings, new adieux.
And to the picnic, all the singers
come minus their golden costumes but no less gods for that.
Now all quotations from the text apply, including the laughter,
including the offstage thunder, including even this almost
human cry."