Sunday Morning

I read The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens over and over during college and for years afterward. I can still recite some of them from memory, and for some reason the phrase complacencies of the peignor lives very close inside my head, so close that nearly every Sunday morning I think of it. Here's the first verse of the poem Sunday Morning, and you can listen to the poet himself read the entire work below.

I

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkness among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.