Wallace Stevens: The Lack of Repose

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Detailed aerial view of beam-steering mechanism and antennae of Arecibo Radio Telescope, Puerto Rico. from which, in 1974, a message was aimed in the direction of globular cluster M13, 25,000 light years from Earth: photo by Alessandro Cai, 2006

A young man seated at his table
Holds in his hand a book you have never written
Staring at the secretions of the words as
They reveal themselves.

It is not midnight. It is mid-day,
The young man is well-disclosed, one of the gang,
Andrew Jackson Something. But this book
Is a cloud in which a voice mumbles.

It is a ghost that inhabits a cloud,
But a ghost for Andrew, not lean, catarrhal
And pallid. It is the grandfather he liked,
With an understanding compounded by death

And the associations beyond death, even if only
Time. What a thing it is to believe that
One understands, in the intense disclosures
Of a parent in the French sense.

And not yet to have written a book in which
One is already a grandfather and to have put there
A few sounds of meaning, a momentary end
To the complication, is good, is a good.

Radio telescope of Arecibo Observatory, Puerto Rico (largest radio telescope in the world): photo by H. Schweiker/WIYN and NOAO/AURA/NSF (NOAA)

Wallace Stevens: The Lack of Repose, 1943, from Transport to Summer, 1947