Loneliness

Nothing by or for itself, the sound of eggs hard-boiling in the hot water echoed by the heavy rain that pours down the broken spout, the cowardly lion’s roar answered by the moos of the buffalo the bloody mouth of the one by the sharp and polished horns of the other, even Nelson Eddy could hear someone else singing in his bathtub the songs from his dumb movies though when I once drove up the vertical highway in Colorado to visit Elaine the Gnostic and take her to the stone mountain where her husband fell we drove back without talking though she touched my knee in gratitude and when we reached the very top there were no trees only flowers grew there accompanied by nothing the name of which was loneliness which Shelley the poet himself suffered from among his beleaguered women you’ll die remembering.