The Man On the Dump

The Man on the Dump


Day creeps down. The moon is creeping up.
The sun is a corbeil of flowers
the moon Blanche
Places there, a bouquet. Ho-ho ...
The dump is full of images.
Days pass like papers from a press.
The bouquets come here in the papers.
So the sun,
And so the moon, both come,
and the janitor’s poems of every day,
the wrapper on the can of pears,
The cat in the paper-bag,
the corset, the box from Esthonia:
the tiger chest, for tea.
The freshness of night
has been fresh a long time.
The freshness of morning,
the blowing of day, one says
That it puffs as Cornelius Nepos reads,
it puffs more than, less than
or it puffs like this or that.
The green smacks in the eye,
the dew in the green
Smacks like fresh water in a can,
like the sea on a cocoanut—
how many men have copied dew for buttons,
how many women have covered themselves
With dew, dew dresses, stones and chains
of dew, heads of the floweriest flowers
dewed with the dewiest dew.
One grows to hate these things
except on the dump.

Now, in the time of spring (azaleas,
trilliums, myrtle, viburnums,
daffodils, blue phlox),
Between that disgust and this,
between the things that are on the dump
(azaleas and so on)
And those that will be
(azaleas and so on),
One feels the purifying change.
One rejects the trash.

That’s the moment
when the moon creeps up
To the bubbling of bassoons.
That’s the time one looks at
the elephant-colorings of tires.
Everything is shed;
and the moon comes up as the moon
(All its images are in the dump)
and you see as a man
(not like an image of a man),
You see the moon rise in the empty sky.

One sits and beats an old tin can,
lard pail.
One beats and beats for that
which one believes.
That’s what one wants to get near.
Could it after all be merely oneself,
as superior as the ear
To a crow’s voice?
Did the nightingale torture the ear,
Pack the heart and scratch the mind?
And does the ear solace itself
in peevish birds? Is it peace,
Is it a philosopher’s honeymoon,
one finds on the dump?
Is it to sit among mattresses of the dead,
Bottles, pots, shoes and grass
and murmur aptest eve:
Is it to hear the blatter of grackles
and say invisible priest;
is it to eject, to pull
The day to pieces and cry stanza my stone?
Where was it one first heard of the truth?
The the.


Wallace Stevens

Posted over on Poetry Foundation