Such a rowdy hallelujah
Is wasted on me. Even so—, I don't think it would be
Such a bad thing to disappear

                                                       In a combustion of butterflies.
It would be better than staying in this summerhouse
With nothing to keep me company but these yellow
Mums and butterflies.
                                                       That crooked sunflower.
And that moon. That pushy
Moon.

2

                                              It is the end of November—

Soon, the season's first fat, wet flakes of snow will fall
And that field, with its rabbits,
Will retreat.

3

                                        In its place, another
Winter's flat, white slate will present itself
So bleakly, so . . . blankly—

4

One could almost write
The History of Solitude

Upon it.

We might as well get married.

                                           in the neighborhood is lit,
Maybe we can invent something; I'd like a new

Way of experiencing the world, a way of taking
Into myself the single light shining at the center

Of all things without losing the dense, eccentric
Planets orbiting around it.

                                       What you'd like is a more
Attentive lover, I suppose—. Too bad that slow,

Wet scorch of orange blossoms floating towards
The storm drain is not a vein of stars . . . we could

Make a wish on one of them; not that we would
Wish for anything but the impossible.

I only wish he could have lived here, in Florida, instead of simply
Visiting once in a while—; how much more essential his summer-

Minded poems would have been! Not that a poem like "Farewell
To Florida" is solely summer-minded or is, somehow, inessential—

Only, that there exists a difference between the tropical light one
Finds beaming in a Stevens poem and the tropical light one finds

Burning in the tropics. Florida's light is far more aggressive, far
More violent, than Stevens knew—

It gets inside your head and shreds
Things, dismantles memory, shorts out the will; even now, at six

O'clock of a Friday evening, the light here in Florida is clanging,
Banging, rattling buildings, burning through the park's green pelt.

This never happens in a Stevens poem.

This morning, the sky, loud-blue and cloudless, the sun now
Fully up. I only wish I could stop feeling sorry for the birds.

Not one decent splay of shade is there beneath these August-
Walloped trees-the birdbath: choked-out, cracked, a-wreck

With weeds—

                                           I think I read somewhere that certain
Birds prefer a dust bath, but that seems a wretched comfort

On a day like this is shaping up to be; listen: the wind's not
Even moving the leaves around; the grass is growing brittle,

Giving up its green. Birds bursting into flame in mid-flight,
That's what I half-expect to see when I cross to the window—

The day cracking down the middle—falling into the weeds.