Living Is About Persons, Places And Things Poem by Dennis Ryan

Friday morning, June 1,2012; Friday morning, January 6,2023

"Solo quiet o la verdad de tu boca
y de las cientas cosas que te pido."
—Nelly Furtado, from "Mas"

"Que chaque jour sans toi
me fait plus mal"
—Celine Dion, from "1 Fille & 4 Types"

Living is about persons, places and things—
in this order. Some people don't feel this way
and reveal themselves in the way they talk
about persons, places and things, express
opinions, pass judgments behind others'
backs though these others already know
for better or worse. There's talk about
places we've been, what you and I have
seen, how extensive our travels, which
is well and good, and one can revisit
these places for a second look-see,
for nostalgic purposes, but the person
once dead only receives graveyard visits
if that. Even in our prayers—no god,
no heaven, heavens to go to. Then things.
Expensive things—they run the gamut.
Houses, cars, jewelry, crystal, European
and Asian China, furniture. My sister
Mary Poppendeck Ryan, for example,
owns costly cherry-wood furniture, a dining
table that she values more than my family
and me. In fact, she values us not at all.
We are replaceable; the cherry wood isn't.
This is hurtful, yet this is how many persons
are, how they think about what's important.
I have a friend of more than thirty years
who can neither hear nor see me despite
the poems, the many I have sent to her
through the years. My feelings are of
no matter to her, as if the poems are sent
from a faraway land, by a stranger, and
she does not understand the language—
she so much wants to understand nothing
now about me. We once lived in the same
town on the west coast of Florida, the
same neighborhood—she encouraged me
to build our house there—our children played
together, shared basically everything between
two garages. She and I worked together.
I still call her "friend", but this is just a word.
When I die, it will be of no more consequence
to her than a blade of her Bahama grass dying.
I know this, and don't need her, but all these
years spent... now a waste. Wasted time
remembering, maybe only my emotions
to blame. She is like most people; she may
feel differently then—deaths change some
people, I know they have me. Wallace Stevens
once said that Life is an affair of persons, not
places, that his life had been mostly about
places, this his major flaw. Perhaps. I'm
not certain he missed the mark by much—
a few loved persons can congregate easily
in one place. More than enough. One place.
Those precious few. Yes, we can always
find one place or another that will make do.