78 Loneliness poems

Places we leave slick our bodies with silky air or foam we feel faithful and tickly (even somehow taste) but can't clearly see. We wear its weight like atmosphere— runs, blots of what we've done in and with each place —what to do with it now?— and what it does to us still.

I was eating my dinner alone, sitting on the living-room couch watching a movie on TV for company when the forces your covetous presence prevents slowly crawled out in fibrous droves. Without you to follow me with your clipboard, or record the game my face plays, masquerading as a cryptic territory and your field of study, the energy maggots turned the furniture into an ectoplasmic mass with the weight of iron: soft but resistant, a taut balloon against the hand. Hypnotized by the atmosphere I fell asleep, and the chair took revenge on my psyche. I could not scream, so I focused my will on pushing back against the animate matter. I was near failing when I managed to utter the word "dove," and then you shook me awake. "Stop," stop fighting with the furniture, you said. Yet something I could not see pushed hard against me, and it was not a force for good. My vocal chords were paralyzed and the language of the living was the only way to stop it.

Someone is about to come but doesn't. Is about to turn on the stairs but doesn't. I button my shirt come from the laundry with all its dazzling blots, like one's peculiar fate. I shut the door, sit quietly. The fan begins to whirl and turn the air into a whirlpool of fire, making a noise bigger than the house. Someone is about to come and doesn't. It doesn't matter. Calmly I lean against the wall, become a wall. A wounded bird on my shoulder laughs raucously, laughs at the shoulder it perches on! My soul of flesh and blood puts a long thread in the needle's eye. I stitch a patch on my son's umbrella. I pick his nose and name the pickings: I call one "Elephant" and another "Lion." Someone is about to come and doesn't. Is about to turn on the stairs and doesn't. I tickle my children, they tickle me in turn; I laugh, with a will; for I do not feel tickled. It doesn't matter. I scan their fingers for signs: Nine conches and one wheel. Note: "Nine conches and one wheel" are formations of lines on the tips of fingers which, in Indian palmistry, foretell a happy life.

When her recorded voice on the phone said who she was again and again to the piles of newspapers and magazines and the clothes in the chairs and the bags of unopened mail and garbage and piles of unwashed dishes. When she could no longer walk through the stench of it, in her don’t-need-nobody- to-help-me way of walking, with her head bent down to her knees as if she were searching for a dime that had rolled into a crack on the floor, though it was impossible to see the floor. When the pain in her foot she disclosed to no one was so bad she could not stand at her refrigerator packed with food and sniff to find what was edible. When she could hardly even sit as she loved to sit, all night on the toilet, with the old rinsed diapers hanging nearby on the curtainless bar of the shower stall, and the shoes lined up in the tub, falling asleep and waking up while she cut out newspaper clippings and listened to the late-night talk on her crackling radio about alien landings and why the government had denied them. When she drew the soapy rag across the agonizing ache of her foot trying over and over to wash the black from her big toe and could not because it was gangrene. When at last they came to carry my mother out of the wilderness of that house and she lay thin and frail and disoriented between bouts of tests and X-rays, and I came to find her in the white bed of her white room among nurses who brushed her hair while she looked up at them and smiled with her yellow upper plate that seemed to hold her face together, dazed and disbelieving, as if she were in heaven, then turned, still smiling, to the door where her stout, bestroked younger brother teetered into the room on his cane, all the way from Missouri with her elderly sister and her bald-headed baby brother, whom she despised. When he smiled back and dipped his bald head down to kiss her, and her sister and her other brother hugged her with serious expressions, and her childish astonishment slowly changed to suspicion and the old wildness returned to her eye because she began to see this was not what she wanted at all, I sitting down by her good ear holding her hand to talk to her about going into the home that was not her home, her baby brother winking, the others nodding and saying, Listen to Wesley. When it became clear to her that we were not her people, the ones she had left behind in her house, on the radio, in the newspaper clippings, in the bags of unopened mail, in her mind, and she turned her face away so I could see the print of red on her cheek as if she had been slapped hard. When the three of them began to implore their older sister saying, Ruth, Ruth, and We come out here for your own good, and That time rolls around for all of us, getting frustrated and mad because they meant, but did not know they meant, themselves too. When the gray sister, the angriest of them, finally said through her pleated lips and lower plate, You was always the stubborn one, we ain’t here to poison you, turn around and say something. When she wouldn’t.

When the bed is empty, we pull the shades to block light, light of resemblance to remembery, long light of waiting, an impatience in the glows of it. The here of the now and the glow that days make in the room, without the body but with the stench of it. So we say,vacancy and abject,against the was, against a philosophy of once and then not. Not-being against. A child once grew here. As lines on a wall. As growing without knowing what would one day not be. A gnawing grows. Grew and was. Protection is curled. Motion- less. I envy her in her room. Hers with paint and dolls and hand- prints. Great green and glowing under blankets with a hand that nurtures the heart of the mouth, purrs into mouth, loves the heart. Heart beating within another—blushing blood— God, the beating, lit, and doing what it does.

Eloquent Silence of everyone I ever loved This cloudy Friday evening Spring but still cold A smattering of new buds Who's that Swaddled in The uneasy atmosphere In silence No chatter or pleasant surprise The lusty rush of a weekend With the beloved Who's that Sprouting now out of The cottony silence With silky whips Still hanging from their little chops Who is it straining To pop out Of the hardwood Rings of time Into the cool air Like there's another cool world On the other side of this one Worth pushing Through to or maybe We're already there Is that Why we shake

What she is waiting for never arrives or arrives so slowly she can't see it: Like the river bluing silver and wearing minutely deeper into its channel, the flow hardens to carved stone as she fidgets beneath the whirling fan impatient for the train that rocks us above the water to arrive: Her sisters and brothers gone, she ventures alone through sunlight and moonlight weaving shadowy faces across the peeling walls... —Speeding toward her, is it you and me she spies in the trembling train windows while the engine hauls us down rails that swerve under wheels rolling through her brain? Faces burn through dirty glass, smears of lips and eyes dissolve to spots of darkness swarming between her eyes so that swaying apartment towers crumble as her nostrils prickle from the landfill's ammonia that hangs above the stacked, crushed cars. The rails that take us to her pass boxcar after boxcar like the successive selves we are as she dreams us coming closer, switching track to track: Now the super unbolts her door as she calls: “Oh is it really you?” —the wheel's rolling through her head bringing us face to face with raveled bandages, crutches leaned in dusty corners, terraced mountains of yellowing newspaper. Framed above her chair a picture of a prairie sprawls round a covered wagon and the horse she rode as a girl, her eyes fading points of light... Again she calls out above the train's approaching rumble: “Is it you at last?” My eyes have got so bad peoples’ faces are all blurry...Now tell me, is it really you?” But already the rails are switching, bearing our waving hands away at the speed of thought over the stony waters that ceaselessly pour out.

One night from the other side of a motel wall made of nothing but sawdust and pink stuff, I listened as a man cried to someone on the telephone that all he wanted to do before he died was to come home. “I want to come home!” That night a man cried until I was ankle-deep in sleep, and then up to my neck, wading like a swimmer or like a suicide through the waves of him crying and into the deep as icebergs cracked into halves, as jellyfish, like thoughts, were passed secretly between people. And the seaweed, like the sinuous soft green hair of certain beauty queens, washed up by the sea. Except that we were in Utah, and one of us was weeping while the other one was sleeping, with nothing but a thin, dry wall between us.

Two musics washing over me, and morning asks, which loneliness comes closest to the inky chromatics inside you?

Tonight is a drunk man, his dirty shirt. There is no couple chatting by the recycling bins, offering to help me unload my plastics. There is not even the black and white cat that balances elegantly on the lip of the dumpster. There is only the smell of sour breath. Sweat on the collar of my shirt. A water bottle rolling under a car. Me in my too-small pajama pants stacking juice jugs on neighbors’ juice jugs. I look to see if there is someone drinking on their balcony. I tell myself I will wave.