Abandonment Takes So Much Time

Intimacy escapes everyone
At some point when you were wishing it,
And leaks out of you at some point when

You really wish it hadn’t. That’s that.
You could, of course, try to evade it,
But most people can’t handle absence

Of other people well, never mind
The surrender of intimacy,
Which itself is only surrender.

Language is a boon in the meantime,
Prayer and sacred beads for confession,
The intimacy of diaries,

The more dangerous intimacy
Of purely epistolary friends,
The faux intimacies of fiction.

The deepest appeal of hermitage
Is the fantasy a hermit is
Emotionally self-sufficient,

A human happy with just the world,
Not only never craving touch, but
Never truly lonely. Cold Mountain

Was supposedly such a hermit,
But he also supposedly had
A bosom buddy in defiance

To slum with in the monastery.
Dickinson had her close-knit circle.
Stylites likely had anchorite chums.

Still, the heaving global news machine
Coughs up color stories of hermits
Regularly—one on an island,

One by a loch, sometimes a woman,
Usually white-bearded, grouchy men.
If they can do it, you think, I can.

We suspect it’s easier to be
Alone far from human irritants,
Far from conversation’s temptations,

But it’s probably hard, even then.
Give us a chair in front of a door
Facing onto sky in good weather,

A chair by a strong window in bad,
And never ask us how we’re feeling.
Leave food baskets. Take these lines away.