Homage to Wallace
Stevens
Which
is more real, the sun as it is,
the sun as he sees it, or his idea of the
sun?
They’d say, the Jacks, in descending thirds:
As it is, as he sees
it, and last as idea.
Their template has no tang and go.
Yet to
him the first real is what he thinks,
not a quince behind valence. The thing in itself
is beyond
description and is to sense
not total or touchable.
So does he side
with Bishop Berkeley, a rêve in that tête?
Not
for a thousand cockatoos! Just he
is not
happy with what’s in your crock or mine.
The girls in our
noggins, the pomegranates,
the Jerichos, they are meet for quills,
and
pole stars, quoth’a, for the ship of fools.
But he dreams the giant who
dreams the sun.
Alan Marshfield