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Sport 43: 2015
Cigars, pinpricks, beasts of all description
Cigars, pinpricks, beasts of all description
What a very beautiful suit Wallace Stevens is wearing
in the photograph on the cover of Collected
Poetry and Prose. His fingers lace like a preacher’s,
a picture behind him is too blurry to examine,
he’s the dead spit of a man who sells insurance,
writes poetry quietly upstairs, his wife snips
threads in a private room a long way off.
‘We believe in miracles’ could be the title were
the photograph a painting, were it in colour instead
of 1950s black and white, and so you open
the book and there indeed it is, every skein you
imagine, the tapestry’s razzle of gold, the man
and woman chanting green worlds into being.