If light pours like water
into the kitchen where I sway
with my tired children,

if the rug beneath us
is woven with tough flowers,
and the yellow bowl on the table

rests with the sweet heft 
of fruit, the sun-warmed plums, 
if my body curves over the babies, 

and if I am singing,
then loneliness has lost its shape,
and this quiet is only quiet.

Oh, solitude, where is the sting,
    That men ascribe to thee?
Where is the terror in thy mien?
    I look, but cannot see.

Where hidest thou, that loneliness
    The world pretends to fear?
While lying on thy loving breast
    I find my sweetest cheer.

They do not understand thee, no,
    They are but knaves or fools,
Or else they must discern in thee
    Dame Nature’s queen of schools.

For in thy care, with naught but books,
    The bards and saints of old,
Become my friends and to mine ear
    Their mystic truths unfold.

When problems and perplexities
    Of life becloud my mind,
I know in thee, oh, solitude,
    The answer I can find.

When grief and sorrow crowd my heart
    To breaking, with their fears
Within thy arms, oh, solitude,
    I find relief in tears.

And when I weary of the world’s
    Deceits and cares and strife,
I find in thee sweet rest and peace
    And vigorous new life.

My garden never is complete
    Without a blooming rose,
Nor is my life, oh, solitude,
    Without thy sweet repose.

In the last hour of night, I lean into
a book that multiplies its pages.
A settling and a continuum:
bedding down of a sedentary body
and a story of an expanding universe.
For nearly three months I’ve not walked 
out into the evening, my skin un-kissed 
by summering breeze, wafts of ghost 
fragrances of wisteria and gardenia.
                                          A virus has leapt 
into another species, and a plague roams 
the globe, locking down its best predator.
Health: spatial matter and loneliness.
                            I’m not reading the book, 
thumbing its leafing, fanning pages. 
In bed I prefer to be hostile 
and, rather, host my own 
breathing. In the distance, sirens
like a continuous Nina Simone dirge.
                           As water through granite, 
I let myself dream of an archipelago 
where I began, a scattering both
of isolation and attachment.

I didn't know I was grateful
            for such late-autumn
                        bent-up cornfields

yellow in the after-harvest
             sun before the
                        cold plow turns it all over

into never.
            I didn't know
                        I would enter this music

that translates the world
             back into dirt fields
                         that have always called to me

as if I were a thing
              come from the dirt,
                          like a tuber,

or like a needful boy. End
             lonely days, I believe. End the exiled
                          and unraveling strangeness.

I’ve pulled the last of the year’s young onions. 
The garden is bare now. The ground is cold, 
brown and old. What is left of the day flames 
in the maples at the corner of my 
eye. I turn, a cardinal vanishes. 
By the cellar door, I wash the onions, 
then drink from the icy metal spigot.

Once, years back, I walked beside my father 
among the windfall pears. I can’t recall 
our words. We may have strolled in silence. But 
I still see him bend that way-left hand braced 
on knee, creaky-to lift and hold to my 
eye a rotten pear. In it, a hornet 
spun crazily, glazed in slow, glistening juice.

It was my father I saw this morning 
waving to me from the trees. I almost 
called to him, until I came close enough 
to see the shovel, leaning where I had 
left it, in the flickering, deep green shade.

White rice steaming, almost done. Sweet green peas 
fried in onions. Shrimp braised in sesame 
oil and garlic. And my own loneliness. 
What more could I, a young man, want.