[Where was it one first heard of the truth?] The the.

Wallace Stevens, from “The Man on the Dump”

[That’s it.] The lover writes, the believer hears,
The poet mumbles and the painter sees,
Each one, his fated eccentricity,
As a part, but part, but tenacious particle,
Of the skeleton of the ether, the total
Of letters, prophecies, perceptions, clods
Of color, the giant of nothingness, each one
And the giant ever changing, living in change.

Wallace Stevens, from “The Auroras of Autumn” 

[What syllable are you seeking,
Vocalissimus,
In the distances of sleep?]
Speak it.

Wallace Stevens, from “To the Roaring Wind”

[Wanderer, this is the pre-history of February.
The life of the poem in the mind has not yet begun.]

You were not born yet when the trees were crystal
Nor are you now, in this wakefulness inside a sleep.

Wallace Stevens, from “Long and Sluggish Lines”

There are filaments of your eyes
On the surface of the water
And in the edges of the snow.

Wallace Stevens, from “Tattoo”

If there must be a god in the house, let him be one
That will not hear us when we speak: a coolness,

A vermilioned nothingness, any stick of the mass
Of which we are too distantly a part.

Wallace Stevens, from “Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit”

[We do not say ourselves like that in poems.]
We say ourselves in syllables that rise
From the floor, rising in speech we do not speak.

Wallace Stevens, from “The Creations of Sound”

This is how the wind shifts:
Like a human, heavy and heavy,
Who does not care.

Wallace Stevens, from “The Wind Shifts” (via Love Is A Place)

It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

Wallace Stevens, from “The Well Dressed Man with a Beard”

I was myself the compass of that sea:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

Wallace Stevens, from “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon” (via gammasandgerunds)