Wallace Stevens on a Boat, Somewhere off Tehuantepec, September

I spent those days in a kind of leisured impetuosity, Siegfried,
Writing poems composed of a hundred lines, cocaine-cut
Into clumps of extremely short words, unmetered, of course
As it was my natural inclination to avoid
All measurements, all figures, above all
All numbers! The horror that I felt, Siegfried,
When I picked up the white book with the prison black stripes running across
The cover, entitled: Versifications, in which
Poems were reduced to mathematical problems and formulas;
And I was very much a snorter of angel dust back then, though since
I've learned to write in prose.

Oh yes, there are a few things I regret:
I regret it now, reclining in an amiable suit
Somewhere off in some comfortable chair, drawling out my syllables
Like the drawling tap of my cigars, rich, old, brown, and fat
Just like my suit, and as the saying goes, clothes make the man...
Not at all like opening up a fresh can of sardines, the little slimy bits
Slithering madly around the watery pap
Like worms in sap, and the delight of taste (at which I shudder now)
When that slippery sustenance
Slid down your throat. I would eat five or six dozen of them
A week (a day, perhaps?)
And get horribly sick on gin, sitting at a blank computer screen
For hours writing on tonic (and forgive me if I'm anachronic).

It's an unclear, Renoirish day, isn't it, Siegfried? Hmmm:
The little, pink bits of fluff (but now that's redundant) trotting over the clouds,
The clouds with their larger anchors in the wind extending down
To flick our ears, fills the mind with marvelous dreams, doesn't it? And good for the digestion.
No, I had a story I wanted to tell you, but it is very much
As a dream, just like those little bits of sirrus shredded on the razor edge
Of the azure; it regards an opera, and a woman with a pale, painted mask,
And a Herculean task, a boulder entirely too heavy to lift, and coffee'd thrift,
Some idle table scraps, and a laugh, and thickly salty
Taffy on Numidian beaches. But nevermind, suffice it to say
I went out with the gang last night, and the motor roared in an unexpected
Way, and the car-lights drifted again and again, repeatedly over darkness.

There's the light-house. Old Collins live there still? Nobody's raising families
In light-houses anymore, these days; I think I read that in a poem by Frost.
Don't you think it's splendid, Siegfried: all of life these days
Is lapsing into prose, like the cadence of brilliant peacock leaves in autumn;
Life is prose, Siegfried, and even when the woman's crying up on the stage
There are prescient murmurs from the scenery, a ghastly parody of wind
Running over the plastic carpentry of flowers, drifting down from a cough somewhere
Probably in the rafters, and then there's the clink of change in the ash-trays
And a few stale puffs of a fresh cigar. Life is prose, Siegfried,
Falling through time as surely as the grey ashes fall from a cigar;
Now what have you been up to, then?