On a Central Park bench, a student-poet becomes the witness as Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, and Mary Oliver clash over the future of verse.
By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 19, 2025
It was Sunday, late morning, and the city had softened. The joggers had thinned into solitary silhouettes, their sweat darkening cotton in abstract shapes of effort and release. The brunch crowd had not yet surged onto the avenues, their laughter still a distant, imagined chorus. Under the arcade, a saxophone player blew short, testing gusts—vibrations that trembled like the first sentences of a story he wasn’t sure how to tell. Not yet music, more like the throat-clearing of the city itself, a quiet settling before the day’s performance began. The air was a mosaic of scents: damp earth, a faint sweetness from the flowerbeds, and the savory promise of roasted nuts from a cart not yet rolled into place.
Bethesda Terrace shimmered in late-September light, the Angel of the Waters extending her shadow over the fountain’s slow churn. The sandstone bench, curved and facing the pool, was empty. It waited, a silent invitation. She sat. The stone’s chill pressed through her jeans, climbed her spine, spread across her shoulder blades. She leaned into it, a physical surrender, her body quieted, her mind alert. This was catalepsy—not sleep, not paralysis, but suspension. A body stilled into receptivity; a consciousness stretched thin, porous, listening with its skin. The shuffle of leaves, the clap of pigeon wings, the metallic crack of a pretzel bag: everything arrived brighter, as if a filter had lifted. She was no longer simply a woman on a bench; she was a conduit, participant in a larger, unacknowledged ritual.
From her tote she drew The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, its margins crowded with penciled hieroglyphs. She was a sophomore at Columbia, apprenticing herself to poetry the way others apprenticed themselves to finance or law. The writing program had its rites: chalk-dusted seminar rooms, steam radiators clanking, professors who spoke of poets as if handling relics. Stevens was invoked in hush, his lines treated as proofs in sacred geometry. She remembered one professor sketching a triangle on the board and calling it “Stevens’s geometry of the imagination,” as if abstraction could be mapped. But she also remembered reading him alone in her dorm, the fluorescent hum above, feeling the language bend her without yielding. Still, something stirred—the tremor that words might bend time, that they could turn a bench into a portal if she sat still enough.
She flipped to “The Comedian as the Letter C.” That line, the one that haunted her: “A bench was his catalepsy, theater of trope.” She whispered it, and the pigeons, used to human murmur, did not flinch. The bench was not only stone. It was a tuning fork, a place where perception settled into resonance. Stevens had given her a name for what she was doing: sitting, body locked, mind open, waiting for the city to become legible.
Then another voice intruded—T. S. Eliot, stern and dry, from “Burnt Norton”: “Words strain, / Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, / Under the tension, slip, slide, perish.” Not Stevens’s easing cadence but a warning, a cold draught of reality. She remembered first reading those lines in Butler Library, underlining so hard she nearly tore the page. Words strain. How often had they failed her? She knew Eliot was right: no trance of perception could spare language from the world’s pressure.
The fountain gave its own reply, a language without alphabet. Its voice was a fluid script, endlessly transcribed by the Angel above, her arm raised as if in dictation. If words strain, perhaps water does not. Maybe poetry’s task is less to master than to echo this ceaseless murmur, to become porous to it.
She turned a page, this time to “Description Without Place”:
Nietzsche in Basel studied the deep pool
Of these discolorations, mastering
The moving and the moving of their forms
In the much-mottled motion of blank time.
The mottled motion was here: leaves circling, coins winking on the bottom, fragments of sky trembling on the surface. She imagined Nietzsche not in Basel but here, hunched on a nearby bench, attempting to master tourists and pigeons, saxophonists and children. Wasn’t this what Stevens asked—that the city itself be read as poem, each gesture a coloration across blank time?
But Stevens was not the only voice in her bag. She pulled out Langston Hughes, slim and sharp, his “Park Bench” already dog-eared:
I live on a park bench. / You, Park Avenue.
No metaphor. No gloss. Just fact. She looked across the terrace to a man sleeping on the far bench. His belongings were stacked in a rusted cart: a green plastic bag, a jacket folded awkwardly, a cracked umbrella. His beard uneven, a shoelace untied, one hand gripping the bench as if to keep from sliding off. His chest rose and fell, slow and steady. Not a symbol. Not a trope. A man. Hughes refused to let her forget him. In workshop a classmate had dismissed Hughes as “too simple,” mere reportage. The word still stung. She had wanted to ask: what is survival if not the hardest metaphor? What is hunger if not its own supreme fiction—one body insisting on endurance?
Could she hold both visions at once—Stevens’s trance and Hughes’s ledger? Eliot complicated things further. In Tradition and the Individual Talent, he had written: “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion.” Was she escaping into Stevens, away from Hughes’s blunt truth? Or was this escape a discipline, a refusal of indulgence, a transmutation of feeling into form? Again Eliot whispered across the water: “Only by the form, the pattern, / Can words or music reach / The stillness.”
She looked down. Perhaps the bench itself was a form, a stanza of stone. It received everything: the boy’s paper boat veering toward collapse, the woman in a camelhair coat leaping at her phone, the saxophone’s melody finding coherence. The bench gathered fragments without commentary. Was poetry like that—absorbing, indiscriminate, neither consoling nor condemning, only holding?
The saxophonist found his line—“Autumn Leaves”—and the terrace filled with it like a breath held and released.
One Sunday the bench was occupied. An older man in frayed tweed sat with a notebook in his lap, smelling faintly of espresso. She sat beside him. Silence was easy; the fountain supplied conversation. He scribbled; she read Stevens. At last he asked, “Do you come here often?”
“Most Sundays.”
“A good place for thinking.”
“Or not thinking.”
He smiled. “Same thing, sometimes.” He closed his notebook, stood, and, as he left, offered a benediction: “Good luck with your poems.” He was punctuation in her life—a comma pause, an exclamation departure.
Her poems began to shift. They still strained, but now they breathed. “There’s more space in these,” a professor said. “More air.” Stevens’s credo returned: “It must be abstract. / It must change. / It must give pleasure.” Change, yes—but into what? Pleasure, yes—but for whom? Hughes would demand reckoning. Eliot would demand pattern. Beyond the seminar room, Instagram couplets hustled for attention, TikTok captions performed disposable verse, headlines rhymed only by accident. Did poetry still have a place in a city where jingles worked harder than sonnets and slogans colonized every surface?
Another Sunday, rain slicked the bench, but she sat anyway. Water seeped through denim, chilling her thighs, and Stevens blurred on the page until she closed the book. A line returned from “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm”: “The reader became the book; and summer night / Was like the conscious being of the book.” If the reader could become the book, could she become the bench? She felt the city write itself into her—the man in the wheelchair pausing at the balustrade, the woman in saffron photographing the Angel, the skateboarder skimming past with ears sealed. Each was a sentence inscribed across her awareness.
And Eliot again, exacting: poetry is not release but reception. Form, not confession.
By winter the fountain had been drained, the Angel presiding over silence. The saxophonist still came, sending vaporous notes that hung like clouds—an arc from tentative gusts in October to frozen ellipses in December. She began to imagine benches as the city’s libraries. Not catalogues of bound paper but palimpsests of bodies: grooves of old kisses, indents of forgotten elbows, ghosts of whispered confessions. A library of sandstone, open to anyone who would sit.
Was poetry necessary anymore—or only another archive browsed by the dutiful few? Eliot had said words strain, crack, perish. Stevens had countered: poetry is the supreme fiction. Hughes insisted it is survival’s blunt truth.
Then a new voice arrived, unbidden and clear as spring water. Mary Oliver. Not a specter, but a woman with kind eyes and a notebook pressed to her chest. She pointed not at the fountain or the sleeping man, but to a sparrow hopping between flagstones. “Look,” she said, a quiet command. “Every morning, a little prayer. A little ceremony.”
“Poetry is not in the grand gesture,” Oliver said, her gaze fixed on the sparrow. “It’s in the particular.” She turned to the student, her voice both tender and insistent. “It doesn’t need a city to thrive. It only needs an open eye. Tell me—what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” The question arrived not as judgment but as invitation, a door left ajar.
And then her words seemed to fold into image:
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds—
a white cross streaming across the sky, its feet
like black leaves, its wings like the stretching light of the river?
Oliver’s presence was another kind of weather. Eliot demanded tradition, Stevens imagination, Hughes survival. Oliver offered attention. The sparrow hopped to the fountain’s lip, bent to drink, then vanished into the elms—a poem enacted, and over. She turned back to the student, her eyes luminous, and said, “You do not have to be good.” The words fell with the quiet weight of a feather. “You only have to let the world break your heart,” she added softly, “so the world may also heal it.”
The student gave in to the smallest details: the brown V of the sparrow’s back, the chipped basin of the fountain, the hairline crack in her own thumbnail. Attention, Oliver implied, is the first discipline, and gentleness the second. Poetry, then, is attention married to mercy.
Spring returned. The fountain gushed into speech again. She drafted her thesis, uncertain about an MFA, uncertain about poetry as livelihood. Stevens’s line steadied her: “The poem of the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice.” Poetry did not have to be everything. It had to suffice. And Eliot’s assurance from “Little Gidding” answered: “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” That, she realized, was what her Sundays had become: recurrence as revelation. The same bench, the same fountain, mottled anew.
She thought of defending Hughes in workshop, furious at the word “simple.” She remembered copying Stevens until the lines lived inside her like scaffolding. Reading Eliot at midnight, indicted and rescued by austerity. Hearing Oliver’s imperative—look—and the sparrow that answered it by existing without explanation. Her apprenticeship was not to one voice but to the friction between voices, to the city’s mottled motion and its counterpoint of stillness.
One evening in May, dusk violet around the Angel, she rose. Her shadow stretched across the bench, a fleeting discoloration that dissolved as she stepped away. The bench held, as it always had, receiving its next actor. Maybe that is poetry’s place now: not permanence but recurrence. Not monument but act. To sit, to read, to hear, to write—to do it again and again. To know the bench, and then to know it again for the first time.
The saxophonist lifted his horn and released a phrase that drifted up and seemed, almost, to answer her unasked question. Poetry was not gone. It was still here—cataleptic, receptive, crucible, witness. It persisted like water, like stone, like breath meeting cold air and making a brief, visible shape. And perhaps that was enough.
THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI
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