After Wallace Stevens: Sharing The Planet Poem by Dennis Ryan

Tuesday afternoon, November 13, 2018 at 4: 22 p.m.; Thursday night, November 22, 2018 at 7: 26 p.m.; continued on Friday morning, September 22, 2023 at 6: 43 a.m. and finished at 6: 56 a.m.

'I have read something, more or less of all the French poets mentioned by you... It is always possible that, where a man's attitude coincides with your attitude, or accentuates your own attitude, you get a great deal from him...'
- Wallace Stevens, letter to Bernard Heringman of July 8,1941, concerning Hi Simon's essay titled 'Wallace Stevens and Mallarme'

Ariel: '... if you now behold them, your affections,
Would become tender.'
Prospero: 'Dost thou think so, spirit?
Ariel: 'Mine would, sir, were I human.'
Prospero: 'And mine shall.
Hast thou, that art but air, a touch, a feeling,
Of their afflictions, and shall not myself,
One of their kind, that relish all as sharply,
Passion as they, be kindlier moved than thou art?
... Go release them, Ariel.'
Ariel: 'I'll fetch them, sir.'
- William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act V, Scene I.Before Prospero's cell

I read your verses as I do words
spoken by friends to me in private:
write on, speak, parle; I listen intently
to every word you say, this intimate
sharing, this parley that occurs across
time and space.If I had to choose just one,
one poem to survive on, which one
would it be? Hold on. Let me deliberate...
final soliloquy of the interior paramour?
I think so, yes—and yet... allow me...
It would have to be the planet on the table.
Yes, it immediately comes to mind—and yet...
I sense one other, one close to these in time...
a seascape viewed from far above, an outlook...
a self-education and a sharing, an instruction
of where to go, and what to look for if you happen
to be a poet (like you) —a lesson in survival:
the poem that took the place of a mountain,
I would choose this one. But let me backtrack,
start at the beginning: we are born, we live and die
alone, albeit in the company of the interior paramour-
that most intimate, intense rendezvous when nearing …
Wrap that shawl tight around you and me, our poverty,
as we begin our final trek through the cold—I beheld
my father, very old and alone, in a dream last night,
and he never looked back; no, he never turned round;
he just looked straight ahead into the crowd, then joined
the processional as will we. (And the thing is, it's my dream.
Mine. I own it.) Heartbreak—alone—wrap that shawl tight
around, and yet—our being there together... (dire memo?)
Solace in absence? Glad would I have been to be Ariel,
to have been with Prospero, to have written poems such
as his/hers, to possess that facility—that tenderness,
grace and compassion—to have served Prospero
willingly, to have been a catalyst for change: the rarer
action is in goodness, virtue than it is in vengeance.
Ever so, that tender miracle once again—teach me
to forgive—oh, well—those who betray and exile.
That virtue, that lineament, that character,
that affluence—to write poems of that bearing,
a sharing of the planet of which they and one
are a part, the book finally placed face down
in the dust. Glad would I have been to be Ariel.
And glad am I now to have this saving view—
this inward place to go to—always a dilemma
of where the artist, a solitary, truly feels at home.
The same problem Jeffers and Oppen spoke to—
to be of, and not—the distance created by clear seeing—
from the granite cliffs of California to the sand spits
of Red Hook, that great a distance, and where to go
to recompose the pines, to discover the view,
to be at home as regards a certain outlook.
I can see—thanks for—I have journeyed high,
to mountain outlooks, gazed down onto seas—
in Japan, France, elsewhere—such sightings
inspire such metaphors. Glad am I—thanks
for sharing yours. You died when I was four,
soon after we hadmoved into that house on
Breckinridge Avenue. I think of this sometimes—
that house, that life, "an illusion that we ever lived
there"—a verse my blood has memorized. And
the fact I was four— sensing having missed out
on something long after the fact. I had yet
to read a poem. And now, into my 67th year,
your voice in my ear, your poems, this poem
an appreciation. You. Soliloquy. Memory.
Empathy. Parley. Ariel. Sharing the planet.