More on: solitude

When will I have time to do
that which I desire,
that which I can’t make
myself do, ever?

I would like for Louise Glück to be my friend. This is a recent problem

The thing I did for sorrow was silence. The thing I did for sorrow, the thing I did, the silence. I thought when replacing the pillow under the sleeping girl’s head it’s been a while since kindness. When my mother was sick I didn’t go I rolled over in my own bed I thought she…

My words verge on silence like great birds that disappear into the early evening: their strenuous white wings carry off the intense sweetness of dusk, visible then in starlight. My words turn toward the night with no look back at what is lost or won, or what is missing, like those workers, who, utterly fatigued…

You enter that light which binds night and day, that swirling mist of pain, fortunate pain, which has no need to be seen. It shimmers on the ever-present, ever- inactual shore. Simple worker, like those who build men’s houses— Breathe life into the whirlwind where the dead shall find you, dear friends absorbed in daylight.…

If you come to this cold bowl with ladle in the moonlight and wish to strip the old self away, on a raw, clear night, some time go out alone, toward the end of the year, on a solitary road, limned by igneous fires, lit micas of snow, until you reach a pasture of cattle…

DON’T FORGET YOUR TRANSFER,” my grandmother said. From 1989, she said this to me for ten years. It took two buses to get from the West Side, where I studied and lived, to the East Side, where she had lived her entire life, first on its lower end and now, in her eighties, its upper…