Fantasia on a Theme by Wallace Stevens
‘A shearsman of sorts’ perhaps of type
but a type beyond us as we read
ourselves within ample margins. Think of
a compositor leant over his case,
whatever case was made, in the old days.
Our blue binaries must take its place,
a sharing of sorts. Ask the shearsman’s
shadow what his hunch is. Unlike
the compositor humming to himself as
he samples his type in the old days
he has no drum to be virtually one with
but is of the sort to make things clear.
The very point, says the shadow, I meant
to make when I came out into this
suddenly good air but did I? Because
it may be the selfsame point at
which the poem emerges from in this
case its own subject’s shadow saying
Cheers & Hallo and perhaps that’s why the
sun sometimes turns green and shears
absently off. And so ‘one keeps on playing
year by year’ and by ear without knowing,
whatever Stevens says, what anyone thinks.
Perhaps ‘Ai-yi-yi’ is more to the afore-
said point whether this-a-way, that-a-way or
by-and-by: it’s the wind that
the North Sea makes. Matching like for like
won’t see us shapes and shadows through
these unsought suburbs. Only rare raw things
that suddenly unrhyme things that are.
‘A shearsman of sorts’ perhaps of type
but a type beyond us as we read
ourselves within ample margins. Think of
a compositor leant over his case,
whatever case was made, in the old days.
Our blue binaries must take its place,
a sharing of sorts. Ask the shearsman’s
shadow what his hunch is. Unlike
the compositor humming to himself as
he samples his type in the old days
he has no drum to be virtually one with
but is of the sort to make things clear.
The very point, says the shadow, I meant
to make when I came out into this
suddenly good air but did I? Because
it may be the selfsame point at
which the poem emerges from in this
case its own subject’s shadow saying
Cheers & Hallo and perhaps that’s why the
sun sometimes turns green and shears
absently off. And so ‘one keeps on playing
year by year’ and by ear without knowing,
whatever Stevens says, what anyone thinks.
Perhaps ‘Ai-yi-yi’ is more to the afore-
said point whether this-a-way, that-a-way or
by-and-by: it’s the wind that
the North Sea makes. Matching like for like
won’t see us shapes and shadows through
these unsought suburbs. Only rare raw things
that suddenly unrhyme things that are.