Nicholas Samaras
December 2005

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 rumor,
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 trodden 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 marvelous enough for me.

The Southern Review, Summer, 2005.