as of a season: notes in tribute to Wallace Stevens (compiled/arranged by R. L. Kusiolek} ===== Finding what will suffice. Twilight, clouds scattering, the streetlamps      slowly        coming on, the wind whispering in the willows.                     (What will suffice?)              Quirks of imagery as night approaches. Insistence on the role of the imagination -- safeguarding us.                  Or, say "the world imagined is the ultimate good."                          Reality as transformed -- a "moving closer to a full possession of the plenitude of things."  .....                                The seasons & their weather -- something emerging from mere potentiality, something we come upon, a discovery out of nothing. "To discover an order as of A season." The poet must seek an order out of discovery.                                The poet as inquisitor of reality, moving with the speed of light from the bare winter branch to the bough of summer. ..... The power of poetry  to remind,    to console     to revitalize:     "I repeat that [the poet's] role is to help people to live their lives." .... Time & memory, a Sunday afternoon, growing late -- mellowness tinged with sadness slowly coming on; a sense of it in the very landscape. Recall the line "The white of an aging afternoon."                      Landscape of the mind, shaded variations on the theme of whiteness, the poet's sense of loss. "The flowers against the wall Are white, a little dried, a kind of mark Reminding, trying to remind of a white That was different, something else Last year or before..." ..... Consider:          consolation as the work of the human imagination, to be found,       not inherent in the material world,            but in the attitude we take                 toward physical reality, in the contrivance of our sense of place.          "These fields, these hills, these tinted distances." ===== TOP