1737: Walking Alone | Lawrence Raab
“Walking Alone”
Lawrence Raab
Where the wild poem is a substitute
For the woman one loves or ought to love,
One wild rhapsody a fake for another.
Wallace Stevens
It is night. For hours I have been walking,
wanting to see you, hoping you might
appear suddenly by the side of the road,
on a bridge, or in the arc of headlights
bending toward me. I have continued
beyond any place you might conceivably be.
Sunk into a dark hollow, between trees
and stone, the river goes where it has to go.
In the cold air I construct long conversations:
whatever we wouldn’t say if you were here.
I recite poems. I return home and write more.
You are, of course, attending within them,
beautiful and calm, near a window
or by a bridge before winter. I fix you
safely, where we might find each other.
But something comes between us, like glass
or water, a distance I cannot avoid.
We meet by accident and fall away.
I come back here, compose another poem,
and walk about at night reciting it to you.
Everything I conceive as possible returns
to an ordered page. I wish I were blind.
I wish my fingers would drop off.
What are they doing, writing all this again?
I miss you more than I thought I would. Tu me manques; you are missing to me, and it is both terrible and lovely, because to miss you means to have the sky and tea and songs and poems and two a.m. and bicycles and city streets and but all of them without you which means they aren't nearly as whole.
After all this, I want the certainty of hidden roots/spreading in all directions from their tree. I want to hear/again the sky tangled in your voice. Some nights I can/hear the footsteps of the stars.
Lawrence Raab
Where the wild poem is a substitute
For the woman one loves or ought to love,
One wild rhapsody a fake for another.
Wallace Stevens
It is night. For hours I have been walking,
wanting to see you, hoping you might
appear suddenly by the side of the road,
on a bridge, or in the arc of headlights
bending toward me. I have continued
beyond any place you might conceivably be.
Sunk into a dark hollow, between trees
and stone, the river goes where it has to go.
In the cold air I construct long conversations:
whatever we wouldn’t say if you were here.
I recite poems. I return home and write more.
You are, of course, attending within them,
beautiful and calm, near a window
or by a bridge before winter. I fix you
safely, where we might find each other.
But something comes between us, like glass
or water, a distance I cannot avoid.
We meet by accident and fall away.
I come back here, compose another poem,
and walk about at night reciting it to you.
Everything I conceive as possible returns
to an ordered page. I wish I were blind.
I wish my fingers would drop off.
What are they doing, writing all this again?
I miss you more than I thought I would. Tu me manques; you are missing to me, and it is both terrible and lovely, because to miss you means to have the sky and tea and songs and poems and two a.m. and bicycles and city streets and but all of them without you which means they aren't nearly as whole.
After all this, I want the certainty of hidden roots/spreading in all directions from their tree. I want to hear/again the sky tangled in your voice. Some nights I can/hear the footsteps of the stars.