"We make a dwelling in
the evening air,
In which being together is
enough."
I
think of lonely Stevens
Now
when I reread the poems.
They
always seemed wise to me.
To
me, they still seem that wise,
But
the haunted man behind
The
wisdom, the tall lawyer,
Insurance
executive,
Caricature
of burgher,
The
company man who walked
To
work each day and voted
Republican,
the cartoon
Of
someone so unlike me,
The
cardboard cut-out backdrop,
The
comical enigma
No
longer satisfies me.
I
think on the feckless tourist,
Drunken
and punched in Key West,
The
incompetent husband
Who
never took a lover,
The
father of one daughter.
He
tortured reality
And
the imagination,
Cranking
that hurdy-gurdy
So
it groaned. He never sang
Of
failure, never confessed,
Never
got more personal
Than
wondering if he'd lived
A
skeleton's life, old man
Asleep
in two worlds. It made,
He
wrote, so little difference,
At
so much more than seventy,
That
wisdom came from a fool,
Emerged
from his foolishness,
Impatient
for the grandeur
We
need in so much misery,
Finding
it in misery,
That
afflatus of ruin.
Now
when I reread the poems,
I
hear a secret proposed,
An
unwritten mystery
Propounded: wisdom's the fool.
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