WALLACE STEVEN'S SENSIBILITY

Language invades
your sensibility
parting yourself in art
at innocent glances
of framed nuances
to disengage your life
from an emancipated time
to take a chance at your age
and engage in a balancing act
of passages of rare emotions
as nature's way
of transfiguration
inside an analysis
of your Platonic soul
from a maturation
of dramatic reveries
in days of contradictions
revives us to recollect our past
is to make a history
of your soul
in annual pilgrimages
by prominent goals
with a metamorphosis
in an ease of dreams
your elegies seasoned
with body shadows
forming monologues
of memories
based on reason
in the life of Socrates
or in your "Notes
of Supreme Fiction"
written on August dog days
your diction is dominant
in your harmonium to please,
after a brief swim
of enchantment
in a heated
somnolent nakedness
wading in
at the swimming pool
enfolding a waiting
invitation's engagement
of bubbles rising
in a nimbus of words
which welcomes
your poetry of surprise
from a gesture
of former images
you sent out
by composing exquisite letters
and maxims on your patio
now at the kitchen table filled
with chocolate sherbet
you listen to classical music
unleashed on the piano
by a Mozart and Schubert trio
by guests who arrive
requested to entertain
by your perplexed continuum
who are transfixed
by your palace of a pool,
yet Wallace you are alone
playing solitaire
keeping furtive secrets
as Baudelaire entangles
your double dream vision
and children out of school
thrill to mingle
on the sandy playground
you listen to shadowy birds
with sounds flying over
the tree shade
and a friend does a self-portrait
of a much younger Stevens
when you were a climber
doing an exercise
of a bard's body bends
on the tennis court
or composing a morning
aubade looking at the fence
in a quintet
of avant-garde poems
in your world without ends
or regret.