Reading Wallace Stevens: A Second Poem For Katie Following Her 41st Birthday And A Walk In The Fields Poem by Dennis Ryan

Wednesday October 24,2018; Thursday, June 30,2022

"Everything comes to him
From the middle of his field."
--Wallace Stevens, from "Yellow Afternoon"

Life is absurd. But many oaks are true,
hold their greens while other turn, wild grape
turning—yellow and brown—on this autumn
afternoon, the mourning doves travelling
from tree to tree, enjoying the sun it seems,
the French mulberry the last to bloom and fruit
as I walk amid wild, light-blue morning glory,
perhaps as Thoreau once did in his vast solitude.
This afternoon feels like one vast unfinished
sentence in time in which I can sense myself.

Life is absurd; we live and breathe it,
but try as it may life asks mostly questions.
Your father wears a big nose and moustache
to work today. He plays the fool, the clown,
which makes good sense: he reconciles nonsense.
He puts up with things fairly easily; has far
more patience than me though we share
certain habits of thought and mind, yet differ
temperamentally. Biologically determined?
The foundation of personality-- birth order?

Life is absurd. Does your father walk the fields
near home like me? Some parallels do exist—
times and places that no longer are. Ask him.
'It is an illusion we were ever alive, /Lived in
The houses of mothers, arranged ourselves...'
The back fields run up to Rauber Hill and Big Rock.
Your grandmother and Aunt Mary pick blueberries
on Brown Road with Louie, your father and me.
Did such gatherings actually occur, so long ago,
in the hills, or does memory simply invent them?

Life is absurd. This is what it means to age.
But out here I am at my best amongst myriad
rocks, plants and wild flowers. In this I am
alive, akin, as we are kin. We live parallel lives:
yesterday, you were a one year old at a local pool;
today, you are forty-one and the mother of two.
And tomorrow? Life plays out. Autumn skies
turn bare. 裸の秋の空 She cries a cold cry.
She walks these fields. Send her on her way.
And so this poem—complicate—addresses you.

Life is absurd. Early this morning, I read
two poems by Stevens, quoted some lines,
and instantly knew I would take this walk,
write this poem—the thought came, gratefully,
and I accepted. And so you become the woman
looking at a vase of flowers, the essential red,
the central color, creator of a form and an order
which renders abstractions concrete a la Juan Gris.
You make life sensible, harmonious, easy for awhile.
We age. Laugh. Smile. With you I can relate.