Saturday, November 17, 2007

A Momentary End to the Complication

I’m a little weary of all the uproar, as I’m sure you are, so… for no particular reason…

Virginia fall

We finally got some rain, and the colors came out a little bit. This is what our side yard looked like a couple of days ago, before the wind came in and plucked all the leaves off the trees.

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The Lack of Repose
by Wallace Stevens


A young man seated at his table
Holds in his hand a book you have never written
Staring at the secretions of the words as
They reveal themselves.

It is not midnight. It is mid-day,
The young man is well-disclosed, one of the gang,
Andrew Jackson Something. But this book
Is a cloud in which a voice mumbles.

It is a ghost that inhabits a cloud,
But a ghost for Andrew, not lean, catarrhal
And pallid. It is the grandfather he liked,
With an understanding compounded by death

And the associations beyond death, even if only
Time. What a thing it is to believe that
One understands, in the intense disclosures
Of a parent in the French sense.

And not yet to have written a book in which
One is already a grandfather and to have put there
A few sounds of meaning, a momentary end
To the complication, is good, is a good.

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