I like my philosophy smothered in beauty and not the opposite. - Wallace Stevens

I am one of you and being one of you Is being and knowing what I am and know. Yet I am the necessary angel of earth, Since, in my sight, you see the earth again, Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone Rise liquidly in liquid lingerings, Like watery words awash; like meanings said By repetitions of half-meanings. Am I not, Myself, only half a figure of a sort, A figure half seen, or seen for a moment, a man Of the mind, an apparition appareled in Apparels of such lightest look that a turn Of my shoulders and quickly, too quickly, I am gone?

It was evening all afternoon. It was snowing And it was going to snow. The blackbird sat In the cedar-limbs.

The fluctuations of certainty, the change Of degrees of perception in the scholar’s dark.