"A Word with Jose Rodriguez-Feo" As one of the secretaries of the moon The queen of ignorance, you have deplored How she presides over imbeciles. Th… - Wallace Stevens

"A Word with Jose Rodriguez-Feo"

As one of the secretaries of the moon
The queen of ignorance, you have deplored
How she presides over imbeciles. The night
Makes everything grotesque. Is it because
Night is the nature of man's interior world?
Is lunar Habana the Cuba of the self?

We must enter boldly that interior world
To pick up relaxations of the known.
For example, the old man selling oranges
Sleeps by his basket. He snores. His bloated breath
Bursts back. what not quite realized transit
Of ideas moves wrinkled in a motion like

The cry of an embryo? the spirit tires,
It has, long since, grown tired, of such ideas.
It says there is an absolute grotesque.
There is a nature that is grotesque within
The boulevards of the generals. Why should
We say that it is man's interior world

Or seeing the spent, unconscious shapes of night,
Pretend they are shapes of another consciousness?
The grotesque is not a visitation. It is
Not apparition but appearance, part
Of that simplified geography, in which
The sun comes up like news from Africa.