Unqualified Offerings

Governor Moose-lini’s (Mrs. Offering’s nickname for her) adversion to AIG’s "construction bond" business was not, per Tyler Cowen, inapposite. The obvious answer is, Sarah Palin is a an aficionado of the life and works of the poet Wallace Stevens. In particular, she has probably studied Peter Brazeau’s Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered, in considerable detail. It’s the best source I’ve found for information on Stevens’ professional life as an insurance-company lawyer, specializing in the construction industry. So I’d like to republish an older poem of mine, dedicating this occasion to the Lioness of Little Diomede. Also Ben Bernanke.

Some Affluence of the Planet

I.

To imagine, seriously, gardens in winter
while browsing through seed catalogs, it helps
to have intimate knowledge of a plot of land,
knowledge that comes not through the eye alone
but knowledge in the legs – legs that have walked
the plot, and stopped, and knelt, and risen. Then
while the right hand scratches the necessary figures
for prices, quantities, and growing seasons,
the phantom left can feel the textures of leaves
in all their grades of glossiness and coarseness.
One may, while dozing, dream a bean plant twining
its rigging of pipes and wires, and see the leaves
jerk in a silver fusillade of rain.

II.

Wallace Stevens’s job in Surety Claims
was minimizing loss. The filigrees
of tendrils that we ink into our money–
stock certificates, bearer bonds, plain cash–
are not there only to foil counterfeiters.
Vulgar as the approximations are,
they stand for the fruits of life. When a contractor
defaulted on a project, it was Stevens
who decided which would cost less: pay off the claim
or pay to see the job through to completion.
Balance sheets, correspondence, clauses and commas,
and the skeletal hints of the construction site
cohered into a vision of the structure
complete or incomplete. It had to be
imagined as an inevitable knowledge.

III.

On a business trip to Philadelphia,
the city of his youth, he surprised a young assistant
by making the two of them an hour late
for an important meeting, surprised him further
by offering round for general consumption
the pastries from a favorite bakery
that he had acquired by their delay.
Before the actual pastries in that room
was their imagined sweetness, and before that
the real taste sticky in his younger mouth.

© Jim Henley 1997, 2002, 2008.