When one has lived a long time alone,
among regrets so immense the past occupies
nearly all the room there is in consciousness,
one notices in the snake’s eyes, which look back
without giving any less attention to the future,
the first coating of the opaque milky-blue
leucoma snakes get when about to throw their skins
and become new — meanwhile continuing,
of course, to grow old — the exact bleu passé
that bleaches the corneas of the blue-eyed
when they lie back at the end and look for heaven,
a fading one knows means they will never find it,
when one has lived a long time alone.
— Galway Kinnell
Galway Kinnell’s poem When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone explores the crags where the isolated disappear. I think of the supermax prison in New Mexico we visited last summer. The men live in cells with a food portal providing their only fresh air. They left the light on in their spaces to let us know that we were welcome to meet them through the slender plexiglass window of their cells. From those portholes, we could see pictures of sweethearts and babies, some laundry washed and hanging to dry. Their entire worlds are contained in white boxes, like human terrariums. We witnessed the life alone, held in a chamber starved for touch. Waiting. Waiting for a letter. Waiting for hope. Waiting for companionship.
In this selection of work, we feel the loss of intimacy that builds over time apart. The love letters and poems try to bridge the gap, but they can’t replace the private space created between two people. During our last visit to Deer Ridge in Madras, we wrote about the extraordinary, found in ordinary moments. One man spoke about the smile that is only intended only for him. Buck shared his free write about planting bamboo with his partner. They split up, started new lives, and then returned to one another, and set up housekeeping for keeps — those running roots of bamboo securing their devotion. As we share, members of the group welcome each example as if somehow it draw their own person closer.
Now I See You, Now I Don’t by OH!
The only way I could get this out was through my eyes,
I listened to my eyes today and they told me that
they missed seeing you up close and far away,
in the night or during the day.
My eyes missed seeing your softness and your strength
cuz now all they see are prison metal and brick.
Michael Stepina’s Tears of Joy:
I thought she had forgotten me.
Blurred from its formation.
I hadn’t noticed she was present.
Not until it streaked my cheek.
A tear.
Jai’s Montana Blue:
With the fracture in the seam of a breaking heart
They run and sputter and streak down
The rounded cheeks just past her eyes’ lashes
Which could hold them at bay no more
Becoming heavy and wet the lashes split and fold
Phillip Barron’s song Alone Awake:
I’ll never say I love you
And I’ll never get to kiss your lips
But the feeling I have for you is greater
Than things such as this
MDKS’s One in a Million:
You make me forget all my strife,
All my fears evaporate like morning dew.
I cannot sleep without you at night,
My nightmares begin their attacks.
Kula Paul Adric’s Stolen Connections from Life:
Come and see your own reflection in these eyes of mine. A thing lost to their so-called correction and lies. Lost time.
When one has lived a long time alone,
one wants to live again among men and women,
to return to that place where one’s ties with the human
broke, where the disquiet of death and now also
of history glimmers its firelight on faces,
where the gaze of the new baby looks past the gaze
of the great granny, and where lovers speak,
on lips blowsy from kissing, that language
the same in each mouth, and like birds at daybreak
blether the song that is both earth’s and heaven’s,
until the sun has risen, and they stand
in the light of being made one: kingdom come,
when one has lived a long time alone.
— Galway Kinnell
The arrow flies true in these writers’ poems. Through the writing, they keep the doors open to love and remain vulnerable in the face of great adversity. And when we come together to share their work, they show one another remarkable tenderness, space for tears, warm embraces. Their hands cup around the flame of their own humanity to keep it burning brightly. | TDS