Wallace Stevens




July Mountain

We live in a constellation
Of patches and of pitches,
Not in a single world,
In things said well in music,
On the piano and in speech, 
As in the page of poetry-
Thinkers without final thoughts
In an always incipient cosmos.
The way, when we climb a mountain,
Vermont throws itself together.

      ------

A mythology reflects its region. Here
In Connecticut, we never lived in a time
When mythology was possible - But if we had -
That raises the question of the image's truth.
The image must be of the nature of its creator.
It is the nature of its creator increased,
Heightened. It is he, anew, in a freshened youth
And it is he in the substance of his region
Wood of his forests and stone out of his fields
Or from under his mountains.


spoken = Doug Ross