26 Jul Last Still Life by Carl Dennis
But the wish to live always
Just one year more, that’s what I take
To be implied by the last painting
My friend completed, where light
From an open window falls unstinted
On a vase of lilacs as it sits in stillness
On a small round table. Not a painting
That says we sometimes encounter,
In a world that’s vanishing, a fitting candidate
For some brighter, enduring world beyond it.
Instead, it suggests that the light
Now pouring in through the painted window
Is delighted to be arriving here
In a realm forever passing away.
Look how eager it seems to give each surface—
Leaf and petal, baked clay and varnished wood—
It’s due. If there’s a longing here,
It’s not a longing to find this drama
A safer setting but to hold it tight
In a grip that time,
Despite the persistence it’s famous for,
Has some trouble loosening.
About the Poet
photo credit: Mary Richert
Carl Dennis is the author of fifteen full-length books of poetry, most recently the collection Earthly Virtues, which was published in June of 2026 by the Penguin Poets imprint of Penguin Random House. This poem appears in the book.
Dennis, a longtime Buffalo resident and professor emeritus of English at the University of Buffalo, where he taught from 1966 to 2001, has also taught in the graduate Writing Program at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. Nearly all of his poems are set in Buffalo neighborhoods, or in settings or situations familiar to inhabitants of this region.
Among Dennis’s most notable volumes are Signs and Wonders (1979), The Outskirts of Troy (1988), Practical Gods (2001), for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 2002, and New and Selected Poems, 1974-2004. Earthborn, his previous volume and perhaps his most prominent exploration of an ecologically-informed poetics, was published by Penguin in 2022.
His prose volume Poetry as Persuasion, an Essay for Writers was published by University of Georgia Press in 2001.
In 2000, Dennis was awarded the Ruth Lilly Prize for lifetime achievement in American poetry by The Poetry Foundation. He lives in Buffalo, New York, where he continues to be an active member and supporter of the arts and literary communities.