Monday, December 2, 2013

“Madame la Fleurie” by Wallace Stevens

Weight him down, O side-stars, with the great weightings of
    the end.
Seal him there. He looked in a glass of the earth and thought
    he lived in it.
Now, he brings all that he saw into the earth, to the waiting
    parent.
His crisp knowledge is devoured by her, beneath a dew.



Weight him, weight, weight him with the sleepiness of the
    moon.
It was only a glass because he looked in it. It was nothing he
    could be told.
It was a language he spoke, because he must, yet did not know.
It was a page he had found in the handbook of heartbreak.



The black fugatos are strumming the blackness of black...
The thick strings stutter the finial gutturals.
He does not lie there remembering the blue-jay, say the jay.
His grief is that his mother should feed on him, himself and
    what he saw,
In that distant chamber, a bearded queen, wicked in her dead
    light.            

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