Looking Across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly

Looking Across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly


Among the more irritating minor ideas
Of Mr. Homburg during his visits home
To Concord, at the edge of things,
was this:
To think away the grass,
the trees, the clouds,
Not to transform them into other things,
Is only what the sun does every day,

Until we say to ourselves
that there may be
A pensive nature, a mechanical
And slightly detestable operandum, free

From man's ghost,
larger and yet a little like,
Without his literature
and without his gods . . .
No doubt we live beyond ourselves
in air,

In an element that does not do for us,
so well, that which we do for ourselves,
too big, a thing not planned for
imagery or belief,

Not one of the masculine myths
we used to make,
A transparency through which
the swallow weaves,
Without any form
or any sense of form,

What we know in what we see,
what we feel in what
We hear, what we are,
beyond mystic disputation,
In the tumult of integrations
out of the sky,

And what we think,
a breathing like the wind,
A moving part of a motion, a discovery
Part of a discovery,
a change part of a change,

A sharing of color and being part of it.
The afternoon is visibly a source,
Too wide, too irised,
to be more than calm,

Too much like thinking
to be less than thought,
Obscurest parent, obscurest patriarch,
A daily majesty of meditation,

That comes and goes in silences
of its own.
We think, then as the sun shines
or does not.
We think as wind skitters on a pond
in a field

Or we put mantles on our words because
The same wind, rising and rising,
makes a sound
Like the last muting of winter
as it ends.

A new scholar replacing an older one
reflects a moment on this fantasia.
He seeks for a human
that can be accounted for.

The spirit comes
from the body of the world,
Or so Mr. Homburg thought:
the body of a world
Whose blunt laws make
an affectation of mind,

The mannerism of nature caught
in a glass
And there become a spirit's mannerism,
A glass aswarm with things
going as far as they can.


Wallace Stevens

Posted over on Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens