After Wallace Stevens
She asked for something bluer than the sea.
The screen returned a sea she had not seen,
And in its shallows, half concealed, a stair
Descending underwater toward a door
From which a light fell upward through the tide.
She had not thought to ask for such a light.
She had not known, till then, that she would want it.
The first request was hers. So was the next.
“Remove the door. But let the brightness stay.”
The water brightened where no door remained.
She moved the shore. The sky grew strangely shallow.
She put the shore back where it was before,
But kept the sky, which now required a bird.
The bird arrived. She took the bird away.
For she was the maker of the choices made.
Yet what she chose had first to come before her,
And what appeared had altered what she chose.
Whose vision is this? she said, because the sea
Was almost what she meant, and what she meant
Was something she was learning from the sea.
If it was only what she asked to see,
The blue obedient to the word for blue,
The stair descending where she said descend,
It would have been a picture of her wanting,
A wish returned with all its edges filled.
But there were things she would not have imagined
And, having seen, could not consent to lose:
The light beneath the water, and the water
Darkened a little by the light it held.
She worked until the stair was scarcely there.
With her own hand she softened its last edge
And drew a line the water interrupted.
Here was a mark that she could call her own.
Yet she had drawn it where the strange light ended,
Following something she had never placed.
She sat a long time looking at the line.
Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when she closed the windows of the program
And saw the sea alone against the dark,
It seemed more hers than anything she’d planned,
And less a thing that she could say was hers.
Tell why the room, reflected in the glass,
Appeared to have a little of that depth.
Oh, blessed rage to put a name beneath it,
The maker’s name, beside the finished sea.
She typed her own, then paused above the keys.
Behind the letters, light rose through the water.
She moved her name a little to the left
To leave the brightest of the shallows clear.