Wallace Stevens Speaks To His Readers, His Rival Poets Poem by Dennis Ryan

Sunday afternoon, March 10,2019 at 1: 13 p.m.; Sunday afternoon, May 17,2020; May 12,2022

'We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.'
- Wallace Stevens, 'Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour'

We can only write what we know about
or imagine. We own our experiences:
they pervade everything, filter the imagination.
I wrote 'Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour'
in old age. I couldn't have written it earlier
had I wanted to—I needed the experience
of loneliness, of old age, the knowledge
'which arranged the rendezvous' before
I could imagine wrapping us in a shawl,
before I could imagine that highest candle swelling
the darkness, within whose light we all dwell.
No one else could have written this poem.
No one. No reason, then, to envy me for it.