AN OLD MAN GOES TO SOLITUDE


Finally a leaving in every night, in every
opening and closing of electricity. A hearth
of coal sift, the red-flecked ash, the shivery
evening. Everything I warmed finally a dearth.

What I gave up, then, when love was a rumour,
when love was folklore at best:  a boxed place
of spoken phosphor-light, language a tool for war.
Where war mouths and ruins language, effaces

names and the scant recognition of ourselves,
I closed the television, the bluing smoke
of creosote spiraling. My name unshelved,
I walked out of borders, the papers revoked,

the night a lost parchment of release. I shuffled
to a last place where stars aren’t blackened
out by a city's aura. I went where a path graveled
under a peninsula’s forest, down to the slack end

of a shore, a tide and draw where wildflowers bind
the ground. What I gave up was a noise of language
for a clarity of something, the hearth of a grave to send
me along to my own whitened father. Now, in the budge

of time left, I will wake in an hour I am unused to,
a passing handsweep in which the knaplight shows
its thread and its bare. I'll notice everything new
again--the mutable boundary of surf, the bright close

of the harbor. A distant approach. I'll linger
unspoken on the sill of the dawning sea
and hold to the uncreated light just a while longer.
The world is still marvellous enough for me.

                        -----------Nicholas Samaras

Nicholas Samaras is the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Awards with his first book of poetry, Hands of the Saddlemaker.

 

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content © - Nicholas Samaras
music © - H P Chourasia
image source -  US Department of State website