the road to hell is paved with good decisions

[schaufemweg]

?. . .

"Union of the weakest develops strength
Not wisdom. Can all men, together, avenge
One of the leaves that have fallen in autumn?
But the wise man avenges by building his city in snow."

-Wallace Stevens, fr. "Like Decorations In A Nigger Cemetery," in "Ideas of Order," 1936."

Comments

13 ways

[schaufemweg]

Here's a Stevens poem that scared the crap out of me the first time I read it, about a decade ago. It shredded my notion of the relationship between perception and "reality," which for me at that time was some onerous thing i thought i had to impose upon myself in order to be understood - a task i never seemed able to accomplish. i tried for a long time afterwards to write poems in this manner, which itself seems questionable to me now, the poems all the more so. regardless of the general crumminess of these ditties, however, the process initiated in me by Stevens' poem freed up a whole lotta F-U-N. i stopped cursing myself for seeing everything from a thousand (tiny) sides, and learned to instead hold each fleeting image up to the light and just love it, the way one would admire Christmas tree ornaments while hanging them one by one on the velvety aqua-colored branches of the tree.
O yes, the poem:

Wallace Stevens, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"

I

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the black bird.

II

I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV

A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI

Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII

O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII

I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX

When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X

At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI

He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII

The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII

It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.