To be lonely alone is not the worst thing,
not by far.
By night, taking in the rain’s spatter and splash of the gutter down-spout,
and eruption of the sump, belching the cellar’s flood on downhill.
The silences are all replete with unheard conversation.
What comes next? Why? And who will be taking note?
Like Thales, I think the sieve of heaven is permeable —
enough to drown us
who long for the return of those pinpricks of leaked light
when God up there steps naked from the shower and turns
and flips the lightswitch on again in that eternal room.
Down here, it’s like breathing in aspic,
a pale gilled life,
even insight blurred like a kind of fog, wisping
between the rain-blackened trunks of two old tardy pines
left de-skirted when the wood was cleared a century ago;
two bare legs, barely an armspread between them,
sharing a single rootweb over the shallow granite bed.
Too dark to see them, but I feel them
conspiring gently like two old horses dozing in a damp barn
side by side.
So I roll over and recompose my boneshack for more sleep,
solitary but not entirely, wondering
as all the long-solitary must do,
To what question might I be the answer?