Art Memorializes Nothing, No One Poem by Dennis Ryan

Friday afternoon, November 30,2012; Friday morning, June 2,2017 at 8: 04 a.m.

"[I]t wasn't any good.It was like saying good-by to a statue."
- Frederic Henry, in soliloquy, speaking to the reader about saying goodbye to the corpse
of Catherine Barkley at the conclusion of Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms

"Death is absolute and without memorial"
- Wallace Stevens, "The Death of a Soldier"

It was the end, the ending.
Hemingway had rewritten it
many times to get it right,
but nothing seemed right at the end:
Catherine dead, Frederic totally
defeated, soaking wet, walking
back to the hotel through the rain.
Effigies carved in stone,
images painstakingly rendered,
intricate novels, precious poems,
archaic statuary—not to hold!
Vanity!Vanity of vanities!
Catherine alive, that's our hope!
Art memorializes nothing, no one.