The Sense Of The Sleight-Of-Hand Man in  General   

One's grand flights, one's Sunday baths,
One's tootings at the weddings of the soul
Occur as they occur. So bluish clouds
Occurred above the empty house and the leaves
Of the rhododendrons rattled their gold,
As if someone lived there. Such floods of white
Came bursting from the clouds. So the wind
Threw its contorted strength around the sky.

Could you have said the bluejay suddenly
Would swoop to earth? It is a wheel, the rays
Around the sun. The wheel survives the myths.
The fire eye in the clouds survives the gods.
To think of a dove with an eye of grenadine
And pines that are cornets, so it occurs,
And a little island full of geese and stars:
It may be the ignorant man, alone,
Has any chance to mate his life with life
That is the sensual, pearly spuse, the life
That is fluent in even the wintriest bronze.

By Wallace Stevens

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Other poems by Wallace Stevens:

• A High-Toned Old Christian Woman
• A Postcard From The Volcano
• A Rabbit As King Of The Ghosts
• Anecdote Of The Jar
• Bantams In Pine-Woods
• Continual Conversation With A Silent Man
• Domination Of Black
• Final Soliloquy Of The Interior Paramour
• Gray Room
• Looking Across The Fields And Watching The Birds F
• Metaphors Of A Magnifico
• Nomad Exquisite
• Not Ideas About The Thing But The Thing Itself
• Of Modern Poetry
• Peter Quince At The Clavier
• Poem Written At Morning
• Six Significant Landscapes
• Sunday Morning
• Tattoo
• The Emperor Of Ice-Cream
• The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm
• The Idea Of Order At Key West
• The Planet On The Table
• The Poem That Took The Place Of A Mountain
• The River Of Rivers In Connecticut
• The Sense Of The Sleight-Of-Hand Man
• The Snow Man
• The Well Dressed Man With A Beard
• Thirteen Ways Of Looking At A Blackbird
• To The One Of Fictive Music
• Valley Candle