While Reciting Wallace Stevens' Final Soliloquy And Thinking About The Death Of My Father, I Try To Figure Out What Verses, Poems To Write Next Poem by Dennis Ryan

Tuesday afternoon, May 30, 2023 at 3: 08 p.m.; Wednesday morning, May 31, 2023 at 6: 38 a.m.; Saturday morning, June 3, 2023 at 8: 50 a.m.

"This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:
Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us …"
—Wallace Stevens, "Final Soliloquy Of The Interior Paramour"

"I'm so tired of being here…"
—Evanescense, 'My Immortal', You Tube Music Video

We are born, live and die alone—nothing
can change this, this most intimate, intense
rendezvous with Death. Wrap that shawl tight
around you and me, our families, our poverty,
as we begin our final trip through the cold to our
appointed destinies. I beheld my father—old
and alone—in a dream last night, and he never
looked back (at me) , no, he never turned around;
he looked straight ahead into the crowd, vanished,
joined Death's processional as we all shall one day.
Out of time—we shall be out of time, out of luck someday,
and some of us, perhaps, will be glad of it, tired of being
here as was my grandmother Grace Fisher as she related
her late feelings to meat my parent's home in the mountains
of Upstate New York where she had lived her entire life.
Entirety. Eternity. (Grace was Catholic, a fervent believer.)
As for me, I look for guidance, but receive none, search
for answers, but discover none—I simply persist from day
to day, no longer hopeful of any discoveries outside of myself
though I remain naively hopeful, make new friends to keep
me company—have conversations, a beer or three—having largely discarded old friends—and they me—and so the days pass by. I still love my wife Kim despite our many differences, and pray for another ten-to-fifteen years together. That may
be enough—more than fifty years—though it is hard to tell
from this perspective, where I stand at the present moment. "Presence"—philosophically defined—I have forgotten the definition of this technically elusive term, the philosophers involved (Parimedes?) in its discourses, arguments and
debates who lived millennia ago, in Archaic Greek times,
on the mainland, in Athens, and in Magna Graecia and Ionia perhaps. A better turn? To feed Hanna, and to scrape
together enough beer money for the next cold one as I try
to figure out what to do, what verses, poems to write next.