I just discovered two late, relatively unknown Stevens poems that I've never really read before. Both manage to figure the desire I feel this evening for a clear, cool freshness, for an unexpected delight in the spontaneities of change that, if one is open to them, occur in "an element that is free" -- in other words, a desire for a vibrancy discovered rather than imposed, since
. . . to impose is not
To discover. To discover an order as of
A season, to discover summer and know it,
To discover winter and know it well, to find,
Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all,
Out of nothing to have come on major weather...
These lines are from "Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction," major Stevens, but again, these two "minor" poems that I've just found (not imposed) are slight, late -- and a Friday afternoon gift. The first, featuring a title striking even by the standards of Stevens's quirky titles, is a short, eight-line (four couplets), single sentence:
The Desire to Make Love in a Pagoda
Among the second selves, sailor, observe
The rioter that appears when things are changed,
Asserting itself in an element that is free,
In the alien freedom that such selves degustate:
In the first inch of night, the stellar summering
At three-quarters gone, the morning's prescience,
As if, alone on a mountain, it saw far-off
An innocence approaching toward its peak.
And the second:
Nuns Painting Water-Lilies
These pods are part of the growth of life within life:
Part of the unpredictable sproutings, as of
The youngest, the still fuzz-eyed, odd fleurettes,
That could come in a slight lurching of the scene,
A swerving, a tilting, a little lengthening,
A few hours more of day, the unravelling
Of a ruddier summer, a birth that fetched along
The supernatural of its origin.
Inside our queer chapeaux, we seem, on this bank,
To be part of a tissue, a clearness of the air,
That matches, today, a clearness of the mind.
It is a special day. We mumble the words
Of saints not heard until now, unnamed,
In aureoles that are over-dazzling crests. . .
We are part of a fraicheur, inaccessible
Or accessible only in the most furtive fiction.
Here's to a happy weekend for one and all! May you indulge your second selves and be open to the discovery of a few furtive fictions.
