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Evening Without Angels
(the voice that is great within us) Wallace Stevens

The great interests of man:

air and light,

the joy of having a body,
the voluptuousness
of looking.

Mario Rossi


Why seraphim like lutanists arranged
Above the trees?
And why the poet as

Eternal chef d'orchestre?

Air is air,
Its vacancy glitters round us everywhere.

Its sounds are not angelic syllables

But our unfashioned spirits realized

More sharply in more furious selves.

And light
That fosters seraphim and is to them

Coiffeur of halos, fecund jeweler---

Was the sun concoct for angels or for men?

Sad men made angels of the sun, and of

The moon they made their own attendant ghosts,

Which led them back to angels, after death.

Let this be clear that we are men of sun
And men of day and never of pointed night,

Men that repeat antiquest sounds of air

In an accord of repetitions.

Yet,

If we repeat, it is because the wind

Encircling us, speaks always with our speech.

Light, too, encrusts us making visible
The motions of the mind and giving form

To moodiest nothings, as, desire for day

Accomplished in the immensely flashing East,

Desire for rest, in that descending sea

Of dark, which in its very darkening

Is rest and silence spreading into sleep.
...

Evening, when the measure skips a beat

And then another, one by one, and all

To a seething minor swiftly modulate.


Bare night is best.
Bare earth is best.
Bare, bare,

Except for our own houses, huddled low
Beneath the arches and their spangled air,
Beneath the rhapsodies of fire and fire,

Where the voice that is in us makes a true response,
Where the voice that is great within us rises up,

As we stand gaz
ing at the rounded moon.




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