It is deep January. The sky is hard. The stalks are firmly rooted in ice. It is in this solitude, a syllable, Out of these gawky flitterings, Inton… - Wallace Stevens

If there must be a god in the house, must be, Saying things in the room and on the stair, Let him move as the sunlight moves on the floor, Or moonlight, silently, as Plato's ghost Or Aristotle's skeleton. Let him hang out His stars on the wall. He must dwell quietly. He must be incapable of speaking, closed, As those are: as light, for all its motion, is; As color, even the closest to us, is; As shapes, though they portend us, are. It is the human that is the alien, The human that has no cousin in the moon. It is the human that demands his speech From beasts or from the incommunicable mass. If there must be a god in the house, let him be one That will not hear us when we speak: a coolness A vermillioned nothingness, any stick of the mass Of which we are too distantly a part.

One of the limits of reality Presents itself in Oley when the hay, Baked through long days, is piled in mows. It is A land too ripe for enigmas, too serene.… Things stop in that direction and since they stop The direction stops and we accept what is As good. The utmost must be good and is…

Beauty is momentary in the mind — The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.

The body dies; the body's beauty lives.
So evenings die, in their green going,
A wave, interminably flowing.