Featured Poet Austin Alexis Page 2
Solitude
I.
Solitude unfolds, luxurious, like the universe.
Days of it follow days, unspooled from a source,
a mysterious core at the heart of time.
Exquisite is the word for this aloneness.
We can teach ourselves to revel in it,
the way ivy is trained
to thrive on a wall’s smooth stones.
II.
The people I miss in my solitude
are the persons I never got around to meeting.
I picture them peering through mist
to get a glimpse of me,
the way cherubs in Raphael, languidly attentive,
gaze through off-white clouds.
I sense them, my non-friend friends,
my non-lover lovers,
and wonder if I’m better off without them.
III.
No visitors today to the long horizontal
heaven of my apartment.
IV.
Silence soothes me like the aroma of eucalyptus,
heated, brewing–a tea for the soul.
Eucalyptus, dandelion, slippery elm:
they all speak to me
in quiet dialects.
At the moment, they’re the only company I want.
V.
Time to stare inward.
Sometimes this weighty introspection is just a job;
sometimes it’s a calling.
Detaching from life in order to track life down,
letting go of the world
in order to grasp its essence
is a task, as well as a joy.
Can I do it?
Can I endure this trek in the desert?
Forty days, forty nights:
the hours expect at least a dab of resistance.
I pull away.
An hour later, I lean into it.
I’m curious to discover
what hides in solitude’s corner.
What will be my first find? My second?
What turbulence will I stumble upon?
What easefulness?
Will there be warm, animal-fuzzy curatives?
I hope the healing I need will reside there,
the restfulness.
Maybe I’m afraid I’ll never pinpoint
what I’m searching for in this quiet:
not there, never was, never will be:
that diamond I try to conjure from epic silence.
On the other hand, that might not be true at all.
The jewel may very well exist in reclusiveness,
glittering in its rightness.
VI.
Something will click in introspection,
some thing, precious and nearly visible
like a bodily joint making its releasing sound.
Like a hidden sentiment.
Like a solution crashing in the distance
yet jolting my consciousness.
Hearing it, I’ll experience relief.
VII.
Oh, embrace aloneness.
Even limit the radio as company.
Like earless insects, be deaf to the world’s chatter.
Exhilaration exists in intimacy with one’s self.
VIII.
The moon is aware of willed loneliness,
being that it travels solo in the night sky.
Granted, it needs the sun
to help it keep sailing in its orbit.
But its best attribute is displayed
when it seems to glow from its own spotlight,
so that a viewer forgets all about
the other heavenly bodies
and concentrates on the single moon,
humming in luminous tranquility.
IX.
One lone hair from my eyebrow
falls to the bathroom basin,
stands out against the spotless porcelain–
a hermit separated from a tribe
and glad for his circumstances.
X.
Solitude, like friendship, deserves to be observed,
but beyond that: worshipped,
the way the sun was once bowed down to
by smart tribes
who knew its life-giving value,
sensed how it nourished and renewed.