The bees came booming as if they had never gone, As if hyacinths had never gone. We say This changes and that changes. Thus the constant<p> Violets, … - Wallace Stevens

The Poem That Took The Place Of A Mountain

There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.

He breathed its oxygen,
Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.

It reminded him how he had needed
A place to go to in his own direction

How he had recomposed the pines,
Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds

For the outlook that would be right,
Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:

The exact rock where his inexactness
Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged

Where he could lie and gazing down at the sea,
Recognize his unique and solitary home.

Nothing had happened because nothing had changed. Yet the General was rubbish in the end.

Exile desire For what is not. This is the barrenness Of the fertile thing that can attain no more.