The Florist Wears Knee Breeches

My flowers are reflected
In your mind
As you are reflected in your glass.
When you look at them,
There is nothing in your mind
Except the reflections
Of my flowers.
But when I look at them
I see only the reflections
In your mind,
And not my flowers.
It is my desire
To bring roses,
And place them before you
In a white dish.

Wallace Stevens, 1879-1955

I remember the exact afternoon that I was sitting in an English class in university, looking out the window, not really as present as I might have been and the professor began to read Two Pears by Wallace Stevens, pacing slowly back and forth on a floor that creaked, dragging his gray but boyish fringe back from his face, enjoying the deep sound of his own voice at least as much as we were, as he read each stanza, pausing for effect.

But I was paying attention now.

I loved that poem, and went on to seek out many others, always understanding a bit more with subsequent readings. I irrationally decided Wallace Stevens himself must also be a very sweet man; but closer readings about his life have not yet altered my original opinion.

Even hard-to-impress Harold Bloom called him “the best and most representative American poet of our time”) and every time I discover a previously (to me) unknown poem? It’s such a treat.

At the library where I work, we have taken to writing poetry on some of the windows and this is the one I have chosen for April.

Seeing people stop, shrug off their knapsack and pause to read these poems is deeply rewarding to me, especially when they comment on them or, as last week, I heard a young mother reading to her child.

It’s moving and it’s important.