Being Alone

No such thing as being alone; everyone
always has his own company and the voices
get incredibly loud the lonelier one is.

Loneliness depends on scene:
walking the edge of the pond I see myself
on the other side, a slightly younger fellow,
someone I wouldn’t mind having a talk with
if circumstance were as round as its name.
But my younger self is always slightly less
or more ironic than I am now, a falter
or veer, and so we are like hockey pucks
just missing each other: no ice, no players,
no spectators – just pucks and a swoosh.

In the library decades ago I slept
with a worn copy of Whitman in my lap
while outside the window a fern tapped the glass.
I slept into the Scotchgard of the couch-cushion
dreaming in parallelisms and beautiful
bird’s-eye views. Whitman was my own
TV movie, America a judgment on our loneliness
and yet we walked together and the fern
was our promising child. Tap tap tap
and the fern was heavy with rain drops.
Even the couch had a personality
for the first few seconds after I woke.
I remember its rasp on my skin;
I cherish its sameness from dream to waking
through all the cycles of aging to now.

*

Reading Bob Hicok's "How Origami Was Invented" (in Animal Soul, 2001), I noted a few lines in the poem on being alone; putting the book down, I doodled a bit on a poem of my own, and wound up with the above specimen.

The few acres outside, with its horses, trees, pond, cattle egrets (they come and stay from eight in the morning until four or five, then return, I guess, to their rookery at the lake about a half-mile away), frequently presents itself as a matrix for my poems, however abstractly they may start out. So it does here, for one stanza.

No idea where the hockey pucks came from.

Then, a memory; of the sort that has no apparent value as a seminal experience: more representative, and chosen by the mind to serve as an emblem for a categorical experience. As a student at Sarah Lawrence, I used to spend a lot of time in one of the several nooks the library provided (it was a great place to sequester oneself, like most libraries), and one such nook was in a small room with light from a window that looked onto a sort of Japanese garden -- some plants, but mainly rocks and pebbles, although I have probably redesigned it in memory. I sat with Walt Whitman in my hands -- maybe it was the first serious effort to read Whitman, I don't know -- and was caught up in the grand Americana of the poetry; then lulled to sleep by the afternoon quiet and the slight rain against the window, waking with book in hand and a dream just exiting the room of my mind, a fugitive figure, doppelganger, or the Poet himself.

For mood and to some extent the rhythm, I had in the back of my mind D. H. Lawrence's "Piano" -- a magnificent small poem, with a strongly captivating cadence, I have always felt. Also, it's unashamedly sentimental, nostalgic -- my weaknesses. 

Some poems are touchstones, even when they're not great poems, but somehow connect. you'll carry them around, and they measure out a range of possibilities for poems not yet born. So, in the above exercise: a good poem, part of the current poetic discourse, the colloquial voice of now, though by a celebrated poet, initiating my own urge to write -- the trigger poem; then going out toward a familiar landmark -- the touchstone poem; and defining (awkwardly, perhaps unsuccessfully) my own space between them.

Keep trying! --