I found this Wallace Stevens poem today, and it reminds me of the Towers of Light which rose through the clouds above lower Manhattan last night:

It is a theatre floating in the clouds,
Itself a cloud, although of misted rock
And mountains running like water, wave on wave,

Through waves of light. It is of cloud transformed
To cloud transformed again, idly, the way
A season changes color to no end,

Except the lavishing of itself in change,
As light changes yellow into gold and gold
To its opal elements and fire’s delight,

Splashed wide-wise because it likes magnificence
And the solemn pleasures of magnificent space.
The clouds drift idly through half-thought-of forms.

The theatre is filled with flying birds,
Wild wedges, as of a volcano’s smoke, palm-eyed
And vanishing, a web in a corridor

Or massive portico. A capitol,
It may be, is emerging or has just
Collapsed. The denouement has to be postponed . . .

This is nothing until a single man contained,
Nothing until this named thing nameless is
And is destroyed. He opens the door of his house

On flames. The scholar of one candle sees
An Arctic effulgence flaring on the frame
Of everything he is. And he feels afraid.

Auroras of Autumn, Canto VI, Wallace Stevens, pp. 416-417 of The Collected Poems

For words that could not possibly have been written for the Towers of Light or the Twin Towers I found the coincidences of language striking. I saw the Towers of Light last night (September 11, 2008) and I thought they seemed different when compared to previous years. The phrase “a theatre floating through the clouds” would have begun to describe it. The clouds floated through the light streams, interacting with the elements of light, humidity, and the general atmosphere. Light beamed to the heavens for one moment, then were truncated by the unpredictable clouds which echoed the light back to the ground, and into the distance. At the time I joked to a friend that the lights looked like “buttcheeks in the clouds,” an intentionally juvenile bit of humor meant to draw interest away from itself and toward the beautiful towers in front of us. For a moment there was only one tower of light, an image which evoked that period of time when one tower was left standing and I (among others, I assume) thought “It’s going to look strange having only one tower.” On that beautiful recent night we saw the “clouds drift idly through half-thought-of forms” and remembered that moment.

Some of the lines from Stevens’ poem are eerie if one chooses to read them as descriptors of the Towers of Light and the Twin Towers. “A capitol, It may be, is emerging or has just  Collapsed. The denouement has to be postponed . . .” Other lines evoke memories of those buildings, memories of the circumstances which changed them from “solemn pleasures of magnificent space” to “this named thing nameless is destroyed.”

Even the words “misted rock” seem to evoke an image of the mighty towers turned to rubble, and here remembered through light and mist.

Cherry-picking for meaning that suits one’s needs is not so bad, is it? Having forced my own meaning onto this poetry I may find it harder to go back and unravel what it really means.