Wallace Stevens - The Man on the Dump lyrics
[Wallace Stevens - The Man on the Dump lyrics]
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 it's 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 sit's 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 it'self 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