(For Wallace Stevens)
The scholars stalking first ideas ransack
his park for origins; they frisk each bush
for cryptic tropes and trample ferns to mark
correlatives, perhaps unearth a cache
of adages or orb of opulence
to add to his beguiling arabesques,
those acts of mind, his fictive world. They sense
he's there, a fugitive from asterisks.
An emblematic toad anticipates
that Hartford's purple light will soon congeal
and close the park; then he'll articulate
the prodigies imagined from the real
and decreate the world to civil song:
he bides his breath and holds his triggered tongue.
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem
A different version of this sonnet was published in The Wallace Stevens Journal, Vol.23, Number 2, pg 197.