Wallace Stevens - The Poems of Our Climate lyrics

Clear water in a brilliant bowl
Pink and white carnations the light
In the room more like a snowy air
Reflecting snow a newly-fallen snow
At the end of winter when afternoons return
Pink and white carnations – one desires
So much more than that the day it'self
Is simplified: a bowl of white
Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round
With nothing more than the carnations there

Say even that this complete simplicity
Stripped one of all one’s torments, concealed
The evilly compounded, vital I
And made it fresh in a world of white
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged
Still one would want more
One would need more
More than a world of white and snowy scents

There would still remain
The never-resting mind
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed
The imperfect is our paradise
Note that, in this bitterness, delight
Since the imperfect is so hot in us
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds