Thirteen Ways of Contradicting Wallace Stevens
(Read Wallace Steven’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, HERE)
1
Among a billion moving blades of grass
in the wind on the plain
the only still thing
was the eye of the blackbird.
2
My mind was empty
like the gray, dung streaked branches
of a dead tree
which holds an empty blackbird’s nest.
3
The autumn leaves scuttled past a dead blackbird.
It was all of a hymn.
4
A man and a woman
are not.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
did not.
5
I know which to prefer:
The terror
of silent innuendo
just after
the blackbird stops whistling.
6
Blackbirds filled the long window.
The light and warmth of the room
crossed it in a black glitter of eyes.
Hunger
pressed against the glass
shivering in the light.
7
O women of Haddam
look up from your feet!
See how the golden light
of imaginary birds
shines in your men’s eyes,
in their thin faces.
8
I know barbaric accents,
listen for faint slurred rhythms.
I do not know
whether the blackbird is involved
in what I hear.
9
Where the blackbird first flew into sight,
it marked a point, one edge
of an infinite line.
10
At the cry of blackbirds
high in a moonless night
all the psalters of cacophony
would be erased.
11
I carried my canoe
to the mud swirl of an Oklahoma river.
Joy swept me up
when I took
the wind on the water
for blackbirds.
12
The pond is still.
A blackbird is dying.
13
It was a cold light all morning.
The ground was frozen
and the sky was clear.
The last blackbird had flown
out of sight.
Dana Pattillo
Note: I feel a strong but unjustified kinship to Wallace Stevens in the way he goes about his work. The above parody is a slight but sincere tribute to his prosody.
