THE PHILOSOPHY OF NEW JERSEYfor Jill
Actually the sky appears older than it is. It’s 63 or 64 at most, not 75. The part with the cliff face and the yellow crane could be in its early 30s. It wasn’t Wallace Stevens who said, “They have cut off my head, and picked out all the letters of the alphabet—all the vowels and consonants—and brought them out through my ears; and then they want me to write poetry! I can’t do it!” It was John Clare. Wallace Stevens said—something like—the best poems are the ones you meant to write. That has a nice sound to it, but it’s hard to see how he or anyone would know that. It would be hard, for example, to accept the notion that there are ideas one meant to have. Poems underneath every peeling sycamore and inside every file cabinet, along with ideas about poetry and uncountable other ideas.
