New at Last Grotto: "Irrealis" by Jacob Friesenhahn

A meditation on grief set at a memorial service for a man found dead, alone, in his car in a foreign city. The poem explores what Friesenhahn calls "the ontology of the past / and its uncanny relation / to the present"—how the dead continue to hold space among the living, how we gather to speak names "as if language / could persuade the dead / or us."

The poem moves between philosophical abstraction ("The yearning for being / without negation") and concrete memorial details (wine, incense, candles, an empty chair, a reading from Dōgen), finding in both registers the same truth: "loss / is the only thing / we know," yet we gather anyway to insist otherwise.

Published here for the first time. From Jacob Friesenhahn's collection The Prayer of the Mantis (Kelsay Books, 2025).

https://lastgrotto.net/posts/irrealis/

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