Five Ways of Being Alone
[ 1 ]
Blessed are those who entrust their lives
to no one. So
Fernando Pessoa wrote, alone
in his apartamento
in a quiet bairro in Lisbon,
between the wars.
[ 2 ]
In the laundry he discovered
one of his teenage sons’
old t-shirts, child size 6,
pale yellow, with a duck
and a rabbit on the front.
The duck leaned
his clean white head
against the rabbit’s chest
and smiled, if a duck
can be said to smile.
[ 3 ]
On their first date, she told him that she doesn’t
read. But I’m a writer, he said. There followed
an awkward silence into which the waiter
delivered the starters: tilefish crudo and
squid-ink rice on separate plates. The pale white fish,
the night-black rice. Do you like movies, he asked,
trying to be polite. No, she said, I don’t
watch movies. He studied her as her glance moved
around the dining room, not coming to rest.
How could he be with someone who doesn’t read?
He could see the timer ticking in her face.
Later, at home, with a bottle of malbec
and a single glass, he streamed Luis Buñuel’s
Los Olvidados for — what? the thirteenth time?
until he fell asleep on the couch, the glass
almost slipping from his nerveless hand, and dreamed
of finding a white cave on a hillside black
with broken stones and cinders. He probed inside
its opened mouth: first a chamber crammed with quartz,
and then a shore against which licked the waters
of a cold black lake. He pushed the rowboat out.
[ 4 ]
He could go anywhere,
whenever he wanted,
down there.
[ 5 ]
He dreamed a headland
and a great gray sea.
He dreamed a keening
and a thin insinuating wind
whipping knifelike,
sideways.
Oystercatchers feathered
into sawgrass nests,
the boardwalk’s long
sawn planks half
hidden in the sand.
Scurried cloud shreds,
fog threads,
the tide’s relentless
basso profundo.
He took the wind-knife
in his dry right hand.
He could have sliced the sky.
* * * * *
Sunday Morning, March 13, 2022
The heads of last year’s dead hydrangeas
say no to one another in the wind,
say no, say no.
They’ve made dried effigies
of their own gone blooms.
The jays and finches in the pine are trying to retreat,
but there is only one way open to the darkness.
Inch by inch the blinding lawn becomes
a plaid of shadows.
The robins’ eyes surveil me
and the finches feed.
They are death’s bright bodies.
I want a body such as those.
The heads say no.
I burn alone.
* * * * *
Rules for the Dance
[ 1 ]
He felt helpless and didn’t receive
the help he needed. Now
he enacts helplessness
to get people to help him
with the help he never received.
But this help is not that help.
He can never get the help
that would help him feel
the help that he never received.
And therefore he
is beyond help.
[ 2 ]
He feels misunderstood because
she gets mad at him
when he misunderstands her.
If she understood me, he thinks,
she would never get mad at me.
If he loved me, she thinks,
he would never misunderstand me.
She’s always getting mad at him because
she believes he doesn’t love her.
But that is her misunderstanding.
He doesn’t love her because
she’s always getting mad at him.