Rereading My Friend Bill's Poems Today, I Realize He Is Just Talking To Me Again Poem by Dennis Ryan

Wednesday afternoon, June 15,2022

'Some at least of our loves commemorate
the sorrow not the joy of the world. I should
have thought that it would have to be otherwise. I know
(as we do) so little of love, the world, our lives.'
--William Bronk, 'The Lack of Information'

Rereading my friend Bill's poems today,
after an absence of several years,
I realize he is just talking to me again
the way he did before, when he was alive:
I mean this in the sense that I hear
his voice in the middle of a conversation
we are having, there is no mistaking
his voice, and it's the same voice
whether he is talking to me, to someone
else, or reciting a poem. I shouldn't have been,
yet was surprised at first to come to this
realization because, after all, he had written
years ago 'we are only two guys talking'
in a letter dated January 25,1995,
which I received just days before
life started going badly for me—
for all of us really—that February.
(I don't want to discuss those times
now, think about them at the moment.)
Anyway, Bill's voice returned with me
from the Bahamas to the United States,
and then crossed the Pacific to Japan,
walked up the steps to that small apartment
in Sapporo in Minami-ku, Jotetsu Doelru Makomonai,
where Bill's letters and new books began arriving
in due time as spring turned into summer, fall and winter.
His voice, the words of his poems accompanied me
on the city streets and in the nearby Olympic Park
where we pushed our son's stroller in springtime.
There's no mistaking—one poet influences another.
(There was something of the Bard rolled up in him,
playing, the lyrical beauty of the sonnets sounding.)
Now, almost forty years on, I can recall a frosted stand
of trees in mid-morning sunlight in Akebono Koen,
and the late afternoon light slanting through openings
in a Sapporo apartment complex where I had ventured,
and there I stood alone, with Bill. Like Shakespeare,
Bill seemed a force of nature, and yet was only talking.