78 Loneliness poems

Light flows our war of mocking words, and yet, Behold, with tears mine eyes are wet! I feel a nameless sadness o'er me roll. Yes, yes, we know that we can jest, We know, we know that we can smile! But there's a something in this breast, To which thy light words bring no rest, And thy gay smiles no anodyne. Give me thy hand, and hush awhile, And turn those limpid eyes on mine, And let me read there, love! thy inmost soul. Alas! is even love too weak To unlock the heart, and let it speak? Are even lovers powerless to reveal To one another what indeed they feel? I knew the mass of men conceal'd Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal'd They would by other men be met With blank indifference, or with blame reproved; I knew they lived and moved Trick'd in disguises, alien to the rest Of men, and alien to themselves—and yet The same heart beats in every human breast! But we, my love!—doth a like spell benumb Our hearts, our voices?—must we too be dumb? Ah! well for us, if even we, Even for a moment, can get free Our heart, and have our lips unchain'd; For that which seals them hath been deep-ordain'd! Fate, which foresaw How frivolous a baby man would be— By what distractions he would be possess'd, How he would pour himself in every strife, And well-nigh change his own identity— That it might keep from his capricious play His genuine self, and force him to obey Even in his own despite his being's law, Bade through the deep recesses of our breast The unregarded river of our life Pursue with indiscernible flow its way; And that we should not see The buried stream, and seem to be Eddying at large in blind uncertainty, Though driving on with it eternally. But often, in the world's most crowded streets, But often, in the din of strife, There rises an unspeakable desire After the knowledge of our buried life; A thirst to spend our fire and restless force In tracking out our true, original course; A longing to inquire Into the mystery of this heart which beats So wild, so deep in us—to know Whence our lives come and where they go. And many a man in his own breast then delves, But deep enough, alas! none ever mines. And we have been on many thousand lines, And we have shown, on each, spirit and power; But hardly have we, for one little hour, Been on our own line, have we been ourselves— Hardly had skill to utter one of all The nameless feelings that course through our breast, But they course on for ever unexpress'd. And long we try in vain to speak and act Our hidden self, and what we say and do Is eloquent, is well—but 't is not true! And then we will no more be rack'd With inward striving, and demand Of all the thousand nothings of the hour Their stupefying power; Ah yes, and they benumb us at our call! Yet still, from time to time, vague and forlorn, From the soul's subterranean depth upborne As from an infinitely distant land, Come airs, and floating echoes, and convey A melancholy into all our day. Only—but this is rare— When a belovèd hand is laid in ours, When, jaded with the rush and glare Of the interminable hours, Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear, When our world-deafen'd ear Is by the tones of a loved voice caress'd— A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast, And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again. The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain, And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know. A man becomes aware of his life's flow, And hears its winding murmur; and he sees The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze. And there arrives a lull in the hot race Wherein he doth for ever chase That flying and elusive shadow, rest. An air of coolness plays upon his face, And an unwonted calm pervades his breast. And then he thinks he knows The hills where his life rose, And the sea where it goes.

The mind goes caw, caw, caw, caw, dark and fast. The orphan heart cries out, “Save me. Purchase me as the sun makes the fruit ripe. I am one with them and cannot feed on winter dawns.” The black birds are wrangling in the fields and have no kindness, all sinew and stick bones. Both male and female. Their eyes are careless of cold and rain, of both day and night. They love nothing and are murderous with each other. All things of the world are bowing or being taken away. Only a few calves will be chosen, the rest sold for meat. The sound of the wind grows bigger than the tree it’s in, lessens only to increase.Haw, haw the crows call, awake or asleep, in white, in black.

Night is longing, longing, longing, beyond all endurance. —Henry Miller The back roads I’ve traveled late at night, alone, a little drunk, wishing I were someone on whom nothing is lost, are the roads by day I take to the car wash in Hammonton or to Blue Anchor’s lawnmower repair shop when the self-propel mechanism goes. Fascinating how the lamplight that’s beckoned from solitary windows gives way to white shutters and occasionally a woman in her yard, bending over something conspicuously in bloom. So much then is duty, duty, duty, and so much with the sun visor tilted and destination known can be endured. But at night . . . no, even at night so much can be endured. I’ve known only one man who left the road, followed an intriguing light to its source. He told me that he knocked many times before it became clear to him he must break down the door.

Our loneliness sits with us at dinner, an unwanted guest who never says anything. It’s uncomfortable. Still we get to know each other, like students allowed to use a private research library for only one night. I go through her file of friends, cities and jobs. “What was that like?” I ask. “What did you do then?” We are each doctors who have only ourselves for medicine, and long to prescribe it for what ails the other. She has a nice smile.Maybe, maybe. . . I tell myself. But my heart is a cynical hermit who frowns once, then shuts the door of his room and starts reading a book. All I can do now is want to want her. Our polite conversation coasts like a car running on fumes, and then rolls to a stop; we split the bill, and that third guest at the table goes home with each of us, to talk and talk.

Robinson at cards at the Algonquin; a thin Blue light comes down once more outside the blinds. Gray men in overcoats are ghosts blown past the door. The taxis streak the avenues with yellow, orange, and red. This is Grand Central, Mr. Robinson. Robinson on a roof above the Heights; the boats Mourn like the lost. Water is slate, far down. Through sounds of ice cubes dropped in glass, an osteopath, Dressed for the links, describes an old Intourist tour. —Here’s where old Gibbons jumped from, Robinson. Robinson walking in the Park, admiring the elephant. Robinson buying the Tribune, Robinson buying the Times. Robinson Saying, “Hello. Yes, this is Robinson. Sunday At five? I’d love to. Pretty well. And you?” Robinson alone at Longchamps, staring at the wall. Robinson afraid, drunk, sobbing Robinson In bed with a Mrs. Morse. Robinson at home; Decisions: Toynbee or luminol? Where the sun Shines, Robinson in flowered trunks, eyes toward The breakers. Where the night ends, Robinson in East Side bars. Robinson in Glen plaid jacket, Scotch-grain shoes, Black four-in-hand and oxford button-down, The jeweled and silent watch that winds itself, the brief- Case, covert topcoat, clothes for spring, all covering His sad and usual heart, dry as a winter leaf.

All these years behind windows With blind crosses sweeping the tables And myself tracking over empty ground Animals I never saw I with no voice Remembering names to invent for them Will any come back will one Saying yes Saying look carefully yes We will meet again

If you don't get too close to people you can't disappoint them, which would be so much worse than letting them disappoint you. To the extent that you gain a perch that means other people look up to you, to just that extent you can never tell them how you feel. You can warble, or follow a siren, or a Shenandoah vireo, into the shade, or take advice from the lights: be a child, or be like a child. You will want for nothing, and you will never be heard.

From childhood’s hour I have not been As others were—I have not seen As others saw—I could not bring My passions from a common spring— From the same source I have not taken My sorrow—I could not awaken My heart to joy at the same tone— And all I lov’d—I lov’d alone— Then—in my childhood—in the dawn Of a most stormy life—was drawn From ev’ry depth of good and ill The mystery which binds me still— From the torrent, or the fountain— From the red cliff of the mountain— From the sun that ’round me roll’d In its autumn tint of gold— From the lightning in the sky As it pass’d me flying by— From the thunder, and the storm— And the cloud that took the form (When the rest of Heaven was blue) Of a demon in my view—

“The cure for loneliness is solitude.” —Marianne Moore Hopper never painted this, but here on a snaky path his vision lingers: three white tombs, robots with glassed-in faces and meters for eyes, grim mouths, flat noses, lean forward on a platform, like strangers with identical frowns scanning a blur, far off, that might be their train. Gas tanks broken for decades face Parson’s smithy, planked shut now. Both relics must stay. The pumps have roots in gas pools, and the smithy stores memories of hammers forging scythes to cut spartina grass for dry salt hay. The tanks have the remove of local clammers who sink buckets and stand, never in pairs, but one and one and one, blank-eyed, alone, more serene than lonely. Today a woman rakes in the shallows, then bends to receive last rays in shimmering water, her long shadow knifing the bay. She slides into her truck to watch the sky flame over sand flats, a hawk’s wind arabesque, an island risen, brown Atlantis, at low tide; she probes the shoreline and beyond grassy dunes for where the land might slope off into night. Hers is no common emptiness, but a vaster silence filled with terns’ cries, an abundant solitude. Nearby, the three dry gas pumps, worn survivors of clam-digging generations, are luminous, and have an exile’s grandeur that says: In perfect solitude, there’s fire. One day I approached the vessels and wanted to drive on, the road ablaze with dogwood in full bloom, but the contraptions outdazzled the road’s white, even outshone a bleached shirt flapping alone on a laundry line, arms pointed down. High noon. Three urns, ironic in their outcast dignity—as though, like some pine chests, they might be prized in disuse—cast rays, spun leaf—covered numbers, clanked, then wheezed and stopped again. Shadows cut the road before I drove off into the dark woods.

I’m all alone in this world, she said, Ain’t got nobody to share my bed, Ain’t got nobody to hold my hand— The truth of the matter’s I ain’t got no man. Big Boy opened his mouth and said, Trouble with you is You ain’t got no head! If you had a head and used your mind You could have me with you All the time. She answered, Babe, what must I do? He said, Share your bed— And your money, too.