Fortress of Solitude
There are types of solitude. Each has
its own culture, politics,
and moments of crisis. For the rich
these are brief, for they know whom to call
to make things go away. Elsewhere,
in rear apartments, offices,
and solitudes more diffuse,
there may or may not be a knock at the door;
crises are more concentrated when
what goes away experiences them.
I’m not sure it’s still there.
In memory, it let everyone in
as long as they talked softly to themselves,
kept their bags by their feet, and didn’t stink
too much. (A student once complained;
said he would have moved
to an empty table but there were none.
Affixing responsibility
to a staff-person, her reluctance,
confrontation and upshot went on for some time.)
Students slept
on books and laptops. Deal-makers
made deals, lovers parted, high-school girls
laughed; for such, locale is irrelevant.
In winter the smells of coffee and slush
merged into something like dog, and the sound
was also a composite:
aforementioned laughter, quarrels,
talk, a kind of music, drifts
of news I recall as boring, an ad
(though this is an anachronism)
that asked what was in my wallet.
I expressed my early genius there,
in notebooks between stares
at girls who were never alone or didn’t
wait, or straining to hear
conversations I wouldn’t enter.
My early work was bad. It involved
one figure trying to be two:
a kid’s loneliness and the kid, who had
forgotten how not to hate.