by David Adams

The cure for loneliness is solitude

—Marianne Moore

Good poet, I must beg to differ,
Especially in this year when our lives became
More dangerous than even we could dream.

Dawn has turned my yard to monochrome,
The snow from yesterday pocked by clumps
Of leaves that form the surface of a moon.
But more than season speaks of waiting.

In this long year of loneliness, my lover
Metamorphosed to a stone of now
That one might touch yet never reach,
Dark magic with no “true apothecary.”
My friends die off like ancient trees
Snapped at last by living’s winds, marked
In some accounting book I cannot see.

And yet, last week I watched three horses
Turned to pasture. At first, they sprinted each
To corners of the field, then slowly drifted
Toward a center, as if remembering themselves.
They nickered, pawed, and shook their manes.
And then these strong and fearsome animals,
With happy teeth and lips and tongues,
Began to groom each other’s heads and flanks.
It seems that only creatures can speak tenderness.

Within a night of sleep, a dream of stone and snag,
I watched again my father climb a ladder,
stringing boughs and lights for our whole town.
In those auras he looked down at me.
Catch a snowflake on your tongue
And you will have it all your life.

Twenty years ago in Michigan, I watched
A townsman hanging lights upon a bridge
That crossed the Looking Glass River
And penned these lines: “Father, do we go
To Heaven/Or does it come to us?”
In that dream he thought it was a prayer.

Now I sense that prayer is more
A trade of breaths than pleading of desires.
Hier bin í. Da, bist du.¹

As the sun begins to lift a little, and
The world brings color to its frames again,
Drawing near such scenes that I can add
To memory—seeking there my hopefulness.
Here I am. It is enough.

¹ These words (“Here I am./There you are.”) appear in Randall Jarrell’s poem A Game at Salzburg, in which he casts them as an exchange between ourselves and God. Make of that what you will.