Ronald Wallace's poem, "In the Great Scheme of Things," concludes: "Ah dear life!/ It's what I am holding on for." His new collection, For Dear Life, looks at existence up close, takes the long view, weighs the pain and the joy, considers the past and the future in the brutal light of the present, and concludes, in the words of Woody Allen — cited in the poem, "Sweet Potatoes": "Life/ is full of misery, loneliness and suffering and, sweet/ Jesus, it's all over much too soon."
For Dear Life begins with poems in which Wallace is himself a boy and the pathos of his wheelchair-bound father, who suffered from a degenerative disease, envelops his whole consciousness, and it concludes with poems in which he is seventy years old — the full three score and ten allotted by the Bible — in which he delights in the innocence of his grandchildren. God, who, as John Lennon noted, is "a concept by which we measure our pain," appears frequently in the earlier poems ("Thank God," "The Fear of God," "God's Grace," "In the Name of God," etc.), but is essentially absent from the latter, in which life in all its mundane attractions, takes center stage.
But oh, the blows life deals! That innocence of the child that as a grandfather he revels in, seeing it in his grandchildren, gives way to a knowledge of a world of pain and loss ("a carload of longing" he writes in "the poem "Modes of Transport"). In "The Knowing" Wallace writes:
Now that you know, you wish you didn't —
all those things that hurt you. You thought
you were immune to the cancer that didn't
remiss, the stroke, the pneumonia that didn't
mind its own business, the old age you thought
belonged only to the already old.
Indeed, in the early poems the future seems an ominous place. In "Catching My Father," a poem in which he attempts to play catch with his wheelchair-bound dad, "my father would wilt, and roll / slowly away on his two wheels / into the waiting dark, waving / me into the future..." Or in "The Day My Father Said 'Shit'," as they take Wallace's grandmother to a nursing home, "And we left her alone, to her own / devices, her whole world exploded, / and we drove off into the future she'd left..." It's a place that brings you regret and longing. Finally, indeed, "The older I get the more I think about death," he begins "The Andromeda Galaxy."
And yet, what the hell would you ever trade all of this experience for? What else is there? ("You too, / can grace the headlines, you can be / a headliner. All the news is good." Wallace writes in "Dear Life") The whole tragedy, indeed, is that it is over much too quickly! This is, finally, the underlying point of the humor and the dazzling wit that pervade these verses. In "Mumbo Jumbo," for instance, he is talking with a neighbor who is a scientist; he tells the neighbor about his poetry, and the neighbor tells him about his lab research. There will be a cure for cancer in twenty years, the neighbor assures Wallace. But that was over twenty years ago. "And now / his wife is dead of a cancer diagnosed / just weeks ago." Yet they continue to talk. "And he's still talking / science. And I'm still talking poetry. / Whatever mumbo jumbo gets us through."
The poems in For Dear Life are nothing if not clever. Two dozen of the fifty-six poems in the collection are in a form Wallace has developed that he calls "haiku sonnets," 14–line poems in which the last words of each line, read from top to bottom, spell out a haiku by one of the traditional Japanese masters — usually Basho or Issa, sometimes others: the contemporary sonnet meets the classical haiku. "One Liners," after Basho, is a lovely example of Wallace's wit.
I intend to live forever. So far so good. His
regret: nostalgia isn't what it used to be. I figure
a day without sunshine is like night. Wishing
to play stupid with me? Don't. I'm better at it. To
err is human; to moo, bovine. It's bad luck, see,
to be superstitious. Whose idea was it to put an "s" in
lisp? Does this rag smell like chloroform to you? A
constipated man doesn't give a crap. Elvis is dead
and I'm not feeling too good myself. A successful tree
surgeon can't faint at the sight of sap. Without the
nipple, a breast would be pointless. The length
of the average man's penis is twice the length of
his thumb. Every man in the audience is now checking his
thumb. Dogs have a master, cats have a staff.
Groan. But all those corny one-liners spell out Basho's haiku:
His figure wishing
to see in a dead tree
the length of his staff
(Elsewhere, this haiku has been translated: that form / want-to-see old-wood's / staff's length.)
Other haiku sonnets in this collection include such titles as ""Sex at Seventy," "As Time Goes By" (a poem in honor of Ingrid Bergman), "Climate Change," "You Bet Your Life" (Groucho Marx), "The Rapture" and "O Shit!" Just the titles make you smile.
There's wisdom in Wallace's poetic observations about our dear life, the sad, tragic, melancholy kind, but there's also a sort of comfort in that cosmic shoulder shrug. There's a lot of sheer reading pleasure and admiration as well.