Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction

I It must be abstract. It must change. It must give pleasure.

II Gipsy, lion, and bird: here somersaulting In the bright bubble of singing.

III There must be no universal weight, No eternal chime of the chord; Forget the transcendental and the wild.

IV The event of science, the flesh of the know— The twist between the two and the what kettle, The stir of figurative flowers; Beast and earth together, a sun that dives—

V In a reed that is bent it stakes a façade. Secure in its foundation of filth, Drifting nights of it, now in consequence.

• Wallace Stevens