Tonight Wallace Stevens
Tonight Wallace Stevens seemed deep to me as Crater Lake
and bluer, if possible: who on this planet without a God
defeats death so easily, cuts it down to size,
devours it like an omnivore of oblivion?
Are not the propagations of death bars to pleasure?
If you could wake up tomorrow uncrushed by grief,
wouldn't you feel less foolish? Tonight Wallace Stevens
seemed deep to me as Crater Lake and bluer
than I could stand—for I am drained of blueness,
a boy's face buried in gray fur as winds from the northwest
scour the pneumatic Chryslers of 1959 with sand and snow
and my parents kiss in the street as they did in life—
yet I concur with Stevens that such embodiments of death
impoverish the imagination, that the only paradise
suitable for breathing forfeits its pales and deeps of blue
when ghosts take it upon themselves to burst into passion.