"No Possum, No Sop, No Taters" by Wallace Stevens

He is not here, the old sun,

As absent as if we were asleep.



The field is frozen. The leaves are dry.

Bad is final in this light.



In this bleak air the broken stalks

Have arms without hands. They have trunks



Without legs or, for that, without heads.

They have heads in which a captive cry



Is merely the moving of a tongue.

Snow sparkles like eyesight falling to earth,



Like seeing fallen brightly away.

The leaves hop, scraping on the ground.



It is deep [November]. The sky is hard.

The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.



It is in this solitude, a syllable,

Out of these gawky flitterings,



Intones its single emptiness,

The savagest hollow of winter-sound.



It is here, in this bad, that we reach

The last purity of the knowledge of good.



The crow looks rusty as he rises up.

Bright is the malice in his eye...



One joins him there for company,

But at a distance, in another tree.