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