Awaiting Change

     For Wallace Stevens

Yes, you can accept the poet’s line
About death being the mother of beauty
If you’re ready for lyrical mystery
To light up the darkness ahead,
Along with his images of the gifts
That inhabit our perishable earth
And that make the mystery of our leaving
Less important than that of our coming
And what we were given to remember
Of our ‘silken afternoons’, our ‘insipid lutes’,
‘Love whispered a little out of tenderness’,
And all else the poet tells us belongs
To the change missing from paradise
But that lives with us here in our chaos of the sun
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