Joseph’s Reviews > COL POEMS-STEVENS V180 > Status Update

“Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imagined

On the real. This is the origin of change.”

“There was so much that was real that was not real at all.
He wanted to feel the same way over and over.”

“When B. sat down at the piano and made
A transparence in which we heard music, made music,
In which we heard transparent sounds, did he play
All sorts of notes? Or did he play only one
In an ecstasy of its associates,
Variations in the tones of a single sound,
The last, or sounds so single they seemed one?”

“…To see,
To hear, to touch, to taste, to smell, that’s now
That’s this…”

“There’s no such thing as life; or if there is,

It is faster than the weather, faster than
Any character. It is more than any scene:

Of the guillotine or of any glamorous hanging.
Piece the world together, boys, but not with your hands.”

“If ever the search for a tranquil belief should end,
The future might stop emerging out of the past,
Out of what is full of us; yet the search
And the future emerging out of us seem to be one.”

“I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.”

“The dress of a woman of Lhassa,
In its place,
Is an invisible element of that place
Made visible.”