Sage For Terrance Hayes

This poem is in direct communication with Terrance Hayes’ “Snow for Wallace Stevens”, which itself is in comunication with multiple poems by Stevens. I imagined this poem as Stevens being unapologetic about his ideas about both literature and race, and using a Hayes-esque writing style to cement his legacy as a great poet and visionary. The challenge here for me was to not become egregiously offensive, but try and maintain the kind of abstract aloofness that Stevens’ work usually has.

Sage For Terrance Hayes

A life lived as bright as snow
mocks the Sun with a blindfold.
Light indeed is the lion that comes down to drink,
Enlightening the wise man who takes
the serenity of snow for a storm, the one
that builds a house of snow and lights it from the inside.
How, with pipes of delusion
lining his cognition, does someone claim
to bring a sentence to its knees?
Who is not more than his sin.
Who is not the bottom of the barrel
and the sediment? I am
the emperor of ice-cream who
flavors language.
Thus, I am language
now and forever.
This song is for those, the ones
who cast a net made of snow, the appropriator
of language, dark as a body made of shadows.

Sage For Terrance Hayes

”Wallace Stevens”

A life lived as bright as snow
mocks the Sun with a blindfold.
Light indeed is the lion that comes down to drink,
Enlightening the wise man who takes
the serenity of snow for a storm, the one
that builds a house of snow and lights it from the inside.
How, with pipes of delusion
lining his cognition, does someone claim
to bring a sentence to its knees?
Who is not more than his sin.
Who is not the bottom of the barrel
and the sediment? I am
the emperor of ice-cream who
flavors language.
Thus, I am language
now and forever.
This song is for those, the ones
who cast a net made of snow, the appropriator
of language, dark as a body made of shadows.