Three Poems

The Blue Guitar

    They said, `You have a blue guitar,
    You do not play things as they are.'

    The man replied, `Things as they are
    are changed upon the blue guitar.'
                       Wallace Stevens, `The Blue Guitar'

I do my best to tell it true
a thing exceeding hard to do
or tell it slant as Emily
advises in her poetry,
and, colour blind, how can I know
if blue is green or cinnabar.
Find me a colour chart that I
can check against a summer sky.
My eye is on a distant star.
They said, `You have a blue guitar.'

`I have,' the man replied, `it's true.
...