lystn

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman

The Auroras of Autumn

by Wallace Stevens

I

This is where the serpent lives, the bodiless.

His head is air. Beneath his tip at night

Eyes open and fix on us in every sky.

Or is this another wriggling out of the egg,

Another image at the end of the cave,

Another bodiless for the body's slough?

This is where the serpent lives. This is his nest,

These fields, these hills, these tinted distances,

And the pines above and along and beside the sea.

This is form gulping after formlessness,

Skin flashing to wished-for disappearances

And the serpent body flashing without the skin.

This is the height emerging and its base

These lights may finally attain a pole

In the midmost midnight and find the serpent there,

In another nest, the master of the maze

Of body and air and forms and images,

Relentlessly in possession of happiness.

This is his poison: that we should disbelieve

Even that. His meditations in the ferns,

When he moved so slightly to make sure of sun,

Made us no less as sure. We saw in his head,

Black beaded on the rock, the flecked animal,

The moving grass, the Indian in his glade.

II

Farewell to an idea . . . A cabin stands,

Deserted, on a beach. It is white,

As by a custom or according to

An ancestral theme or as a consequence

Of an infinite course. The flowers against the wall

Are white, a little dried, a kind of mark

Reminding, trying to remind, of a white

That was different, something else, last year

Or before, not the white of an aging afternoon,

Whether fresher or duller, whether of winter cloud

Or of winter sky, from horizon to horizon.

The wind is blowing the sand across the floor.

Here, being visible is being white,

Is being of the solid of white, the accomplishment

Of an extremist in an exercise . . .

The season changes. A cold wind chills the beach.

The long lines of it grow longer, emptier,

A darkness gathers though it does not fall

And the whiteness grows less vivid on the wall.

The man who is walking turns blankly on the sand.

He observes how the north is always enlarging the change,

With its frigid brilliances, its blue-red sweeps

And gusts of great enkindlings, its polar green,

The color of ice and fire and solitude.

III

Farewell to an idea . . . The mother's face,

The purpose of the poem, fills the room.

They are together, here, and it is warm,

With none of the prescience of oncoming dreams.

It is evening. The house is evening, half dissolved.

Only the half they can never possess remains,

Still-starred. It is the mother they possess,

Who gives transparence to their present peace.

She makes that gentler that can gentle be.

And yet she too is dissolved, she is destroyed.

She gives transparence. But she has grown old.

The necklace is a carving not a kiss.

The soft hands are a motion not a touch.

The house will crumble and the books will burn.

They are at ease in a shelter of the mind

And the house is of the mind and they and time,

Together, all together. Boreal night

Will look like frost as it approaches them

And to the mother as she falls asleep

And as they say good-night, good-night. Upstairs

The windows will be lighted, not the rooms.

A wind will spread its windy grandeurs round

And knock like a rifle-butt against the door.

The wind will command them with invincible sound.

IV

Farewell to an idea . . . The cancellings,

The negations are never final. The father sits

In space, wherever he sits, of bleak regard,

As one that is strong in the bushes of his eyes.

He says no to no and yes to yes. He says yes

To no; and in saying yes he says farewell.

He measures the velocities of change.

He leaps from heaven to heaven more rapidly

Than bad angels leap from heaven to hell in flam es.

But now he sits in quiet and green-a-day.

He assumes the great speeds of space and flutters them

From cloud to cloudless, cloudless to keen clear

In flights of eye and ear, the highest eye

And the lowest ear, the deep ear that discerns,

At evening, things that attend it until it hears

The supernatural preludes of its own,

At the moment when the angelic eye defines

Its actors approaching, in company, in their masks.

Master O master seated by the fire

And yet in space and motionless and yet

Of motion the ever-brightening origin,

Profound, and yet the king and yet the crown,

Look at this present throne. What company,

In masks, can choir it with the naked wind?

Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman