Fate Nothing Purple of His Heart’s Cry
Fate Nothing Purple of His Heart’s Cry
By Joshua Chalifour
What the audience beheld, to him
is to question why forgetfulness
becomes the heliotrope's hue
of understanding.
How the sordid core of calamity belongs
to poverty and
it belongs to the beggar.
Speak, he that be:
I am he and
he is strong and
after poverty, he
without misery,
on tasting bread,
becomes
the summer pole.
The boards and bricks of
his theatre's thereafter
have his strong order.
He has not in misery,
beheld what a captious muse
would bare to the scenery
of his glacial night.
But he has a high and loftier strut.
Is it an order? What he has thereafter
or...
he beholds it, what Melpomene
in sure beauty, lights for midnight.
You make out your repartee
and say it:
he belonged where the Northern cold's
core, hard and inconstant (not bad),
has dressed his mad muse in time
—without a gown.
He gazes at it, heart's water,
but more to the lines he has found in sky.
In a Bad Time
By Wallace Stevens 1
1 Wallace Stevens, “In a Bad Time,” in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, Vintage Books, The Auroras of Autumn (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1990).
How mad would he have to be to say, "He beheld
An order and thereafter he belonged
To it"? He beheld the order of the northern sky.
But the beggar gazes on calamity
And thereafter he belongs to it, to bread
Hard found, and water tasting of misery.
For him cold's glacial beauty is his fate.
Without understanding, he belongs to it
And the night, and midnight, and after, where it is.
What has he? What he has he has. But what?
It is not a question of captious repartee.
What has he that becomes his heart's strong core?
He has his poverty and nothing more.
His poverty becomes his heart's strong core--
A forgetfulness of summer at the pole.
Sordid Melpomene, why strut bare boards,
Without scenery or lights, in the theatre's bricks,
Dressed high in heliotrope's inconstant hue,
The muse of misery? Speak loftier lines.
Cry out, "I am the purple muse." Make sure
The audience beholds you, not your gown.