Suddenly Summer

I welcome the new season with optimism in the language of stillness and a heart full of gratitude.

In celebration and contemplation of summer, here is the second canto of Wallace Steven’s poem “Credences Of Summer”

II.

​Postpone the anatomy of summer, as

The physical pine, the metaphysical pine.

Let’s see the very thing and nothing else.

Let’s see it with the hottest fire of sight.

Burn everything not part of it to ash.

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Trace the gold sun about the whitened sky

Without evasion by a single metaphor.

Look at it in its essential barrenness

And say this, this is the centre that I seek.

Fix it in an eternal foliage

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And fill the foliage with arrested peace,

Joy of such permanence, right ignorance

Of change still possible. Exile desire

For what is not. This is the barrenness

Of the fertile thing that can attain no more.

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