(For Wallace Stevens) <br /> <br />The scholars stalking first ideas ransack <br />his park for origins; they frisk each bush <br />for cryptic tropes and trample ferns to mark <br />correlatives, perhaps unearth a cache <br />of adages or orb of opulence <br />to add to his beguiling arabesques, <br />those acts of mind, his fictive world. They sense <br />he's there, a fugitive from asterisks. <br /> <br />An emblematic toad anticipates <br />that Hartford's purple light will soon congeal <br />and close the park; then he'll articulate <br />the prodigies imagined from the real <br />and decreate the world to civil song: <br />he bides his breath and holds his triggered tongue.<br /><br />William F Dougherty<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/sanctuary-in-elizabeth-park/
