Free Second Childhood by Fanny Howe

Loneliness
    Loneliness is not an accident or a choice.
    It’s an uninvited and uncreated companion.
    It slips in beside you when you are not aware that a choice you are making will have consequences.
    It does you no good even though it’s like one of the elements in the world that you cannot exist without.
    It takes your hand and walks with you. It lies down with you. It sits beside you. It’s as dark as a shadow but it has substance that is familiar.
    It swims with you and swings around on stools.
    It boards the ferry and leans on the motel desk.
    Nothing great happens as a result of loneliness.
    Your character flaws remain in place. You still stop in with friends and have wonderful hours among them, but you must run as soon as you hear it calling.
    It does call. And you climb the stairs obediently, pushing aside books and notes to let it know that you have returned to it, all is well.
    If you don’t answer its call, you sense that it will sink towards a deep gravity and adopt a limp.
    From loneliness you learn very little. It pulls you back, it pulls you down.
    It’s the manifestation of a vow never made but kept: I will go home now and forever in solitude.
    And after that loneliness will accompany you to every airport, train station, bus depot, café, cinema, and onto airplanes and into cars, strange rooms and offices, classrooms and libraries, and it will hang near your hand like a habit.
    But it isn’t a habit and no one can see it.
    It’s your obligation, and your companion warms itself against you.
    You are faithful to it because it was the only vow you made finally, when it was unnecessary.
    If you figured out why you chose it, years later, would you ask it to go?
    How would you replace it?
    No, saying good-bye would be too embarrassing.
    Why?
    First you might cry.
    Because shame and loneliness are almost one.
    Shame at existing in the first place. Shame at being visible, taking up space, breathing some of the sky, sleeping in a whole bed, asking for a share.
    Loneliness feels so much like shame, it always seems to need a little more time on its own.

The Monk and Her Seaside Dreams
    The monk is a single
    and so am I
    but which kind?
    All of them
    from young to wild
    and the boyish one
    (mine) cared for the weak
    until there was no one
    to care for him
    besides an old woman
    who lived as a she.
    I became a penitent
    sequentially:
    first in sandals
    then in boots
    then with a hood
    and bare feet.
    Now night-bound, now nude, then old.

    Another brother and I took a train with a view of mountains
    floating in water
    out of Limerick Junction
    to Heuston Station where Wittgenstein
    tried to discover emotion.
    He hit a horizon.
    “Philosophy should only be written as poetry.”

    In a Sabbath atmosphere you stand still and look backwards
    for time has ceased its labors
    and no cattle tremble.
    You can contemplate the peripheries
    and for a flash see the future as a field in a semi-circle.
    Everything is even on the Sabbath. The died and the living.
    Each person or place wants you as much as you want another.

    Towards a just
    and invisible image
    behind each word
    and its place in a sentence
    we must have been sailing.
    Scarcely defended, best
    when lost from wanting perfect sense.
    But still, recognizable.
    Be like grass, the phantom told us:
    lie flat, spring up.
    Our veils were scrolls
    you couldn’t walk into
    but only mark the folds.

    I’ve lost my child at the bend where we parted.
    We will never come back to that hour.
    Let me write about the place again the path so sandy
    and the table cloth blowing in a wind from Newfoundland.
    It was here it began. She left her bouillabaisse untouched
    and headed out on the train.
    Sort of, soft, gold at sunset, turrets and sandals
    were hard to identify so many copies.
    Let me concentrate on ancestral faces
    and I will recognize hers
    before my powers fail and our DNA has been smeared
    on cups and cigarettes, bottles and gloves, bowls and spoons
    and replicated, sucked