for Steve, in memoriam

After you divorced, ten years passed before
We saw each other and,
By that time, ruin found me too
I can’t begin to tell the story

It doesn’t matter now.  Let it suffice
That we were friends
And no one makes friends, thinking:
Someday I’ll watch him go

You left me one last message
Which I haven’t listened to
Save it, some quiet voice tells me,
The one I used to confuse for God’s

“Hows Your Meal,” A Max Stablein Joint

*

After publishing the last post a few days ago, Shannon and I talked about the appropriateness of this particular revision.  Stevens, after the publication of Harmonium and the birth of his daughter, Holly, took a ten-year long hiatus before returning to poetry.  That ten years of silence was as necessary as any writing that had preceded it.  I’ve said on many occasions that I don’t believe in writer’s block.  I believe in the writing process, and a necessary step in that process is silence.  Not all silences are the same.  There is the one after a sudden shock or blow.  There is the pause that comes between thoughts.  There is the silence of having emptied a thing, a room, a house, a neighborhood, a life.  Can you imagine Stevens fretting about writer’s block?  No, if there is something to say, then say it.  If there isn’t, then shut up.  And if your life is taken up with the joys and despairs of living, then, well, what is there to say about that?