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Suicide City
The concept of sin is a real mean scheme
that causes one to feel so rot and shame---
ultimate tragedy of a frozen cosmos.
Smooth stones rotate round in a ring,
stars whose song is Ceaseless Trance,
while a fit girl twirls in a skirt of sorrow
and teardrops trickle in Moonlight City
and the surface of her skin shivers tight,
illuminated also by a streetlamp,
and vibrates through to the magical core.
Moonlight journeys in Concrete Valley
to Big Bridge where she goes for calm
and dangles a pair of pretty sandals
over its endlessly shimmering silver rail
and gazes down to the dim river rush.
Blonde strands of hair curl in her vision.
Although I cannot agree with
Although I cannot agree with the first lne's assertion, that is no bar to my total enjoyment of the poem (I cannot agree with some of Stevens' assertions, either, but that does not at all inhibit my love of his poetry). This poem follows the same process that I attempted to describe in my previous comment, today, so that I would sound gushingly redundant if I repeated all that here. I like the way the final line dovetails, implicitly, from the dancer's vision to the speaker's vision; and, by further implication to the Poet's and readers' vision. This is a very subtle poem---invitingly simple on its surface, but far more complicated beneath that surface, where the actual gist of it is.
Starward