Reading Wallace Stevens

Reading Wallace Stevens is like
eating sand, at first.
So dry! Why? What’s it about?
What palm? Where? What décor?

But the movements of the man’s mind,
the strange symbols,
his dense locutions and images,
and that for which the symbols stand...

Who ever would have thought
that ol’ Hartford Fire & Indemnity man,
that strange, cagey, clear-thinking,
clearly eccentric, pragmatic executive
would express himself in such
suggestive language?