Wallace Stevens Journal

Hey, Old Man— One thing is clear: We could not have stood each other, too unlike spirits to keep converse. Changing lives, I tarried in your house; as you may know, if ever your daemon and my angel parley.

I heard the cadence of the rain you knew, coming down on the hill between Prospect and the Little River. I luxuriated in the falling of your light, rolled myself up in the redolence of your rotting leaves. I shushed and muttered at your ghost, when I wasn’t overbusy with mine. Man of business, you’d have had no truck with this willful seeker skeptic, Johnny-Come-Lately volunteer intruding in your garden.

In your shadow I walked your walk, stepped along remembering a certain blackbird, the first I knew of you. A good gait you had, matched like your sartorial habitus in all weathers, to suit time of day and season, inward to work, outward home; its parsing ever after setting the paces beneath the offbeat pulsing in the carcasses of your poems. [End Page 287]