Illustration

Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself


Before a sign may acquire meaning and therefore become a symbol there must exist something for this sign to symbolize.


Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself
Wallace Stevens
1954



At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,
A bird’s cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.

The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow...
It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier-mache...
The sun was coming from the outside.

That scrawny cry — It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.


Cargo Collective 2017 — Frogtown, Los Angeles