Well Bottom Blues

To find my home in one sentence, concise, as if hammered in metal. Not to enchant anybody. Not to earn a lasting name in posterity. An unnamed need for order, for rhythm, for form, which three words are opposed to chaos and nothingness.

—Czeslaw Milosz, Berkeley–Paris–Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1981–1983

Which brought Wallace Stevens “The Idea of Order at Key West” to mind, another poet very concerned withhow poetry brings some order to a chaotic world, how by perception we make the world around us, name it’s colors, shapes and textures, give voice to its sound; not adamic but as Creators of our world.

But it was more than that,   

More even than her voice, and ours, among

The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,   

Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped   

On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres   

Of sky and sea.

                           It was her voice that made   

The sky acutest at its vanishing.   

She measured to the hour its solitude.   

She was the single artificer of the world

In which she sang.

If, like Stevens, we have stepped away from our own artifice of The Creator, then what prevents us from from taking up that mantle and spesking The Words.