The soul of Walt Whitman has gone into the ocean
and I like to picture myself there,
barefoot as the tide washes in,
accepting the wind into pores
to heal every affliction.
Loneliness
is the final affliction.
It may exist on separate clouds
but true loneliness—
the final condition—
is what swells inside
when every person is gone or seems gone
and you begin to feel
gone
from yourself.
Walt Whitman must have known this,
for he devoted himself to a purpose:
to kill loneliness,
to glue together the soul of the world.
Meanwhile
I’m here, West Virginia, and the ocean
is hundreds of miles from here.
The lights are bright to burn my clothes,
I breathe in tidal wave hallways,
I watch the moonlight wax
on a sign
in a strip mall parking lot.
Hundreds of miles from here,
the ocean speaks
but all I hear is the sad singing of insects
which is fine.
I remember myself kneeling by the ocean,
Pismo Beach, California, it was December,
I wore a flannel shirt cuffed bluejeans and
no shoes,
I was kneeling to pick up a perfect sand dollar
I had not written a decent poem in months.
Looked out over the water,
the wind singing through bones,
the sun as bright as I had ever seen—
I remember myself by the ocean
the edge of the continent,
the bite of sand on cold feet,
the death of loneliness.
It creeps back in, of course, in time
I cannot escape myself
but I do like to picture myself kneeling
at the ocean,
the dark gray feeling
melting
away.
The walls may turn black,
the ceiling may swirl and the sun
may disappear,
but living is possible.
Life expands. It swells. The soul grows with time.
In a nursing home, I look
at my old grandfather.
He has Parkinson’s Disease,
his body is a prison.
His body burns
with nearly 90 years of living,
his soul is burning to burst through the walls.
He sits in a leather chair, a blanket
covers his legs.
If I touch his hand, he turns to face me.
His eyes are so beautiful,
burning
90 years of soul.
There is a future
without eyes,
a future that doesn’t include any of us.
The ocean
calls me home
as the moonlight waxes
on a sign
in a strip mall parking lot.
The moon will remain
but the sign
and the strip mall
will shrink to skeletons
with no eyes to watch them
That future
is so easy to picture—
I can see its shadow now.
I see the shadow of the sky
that has fallen against the land
I see the ocean
that has crashed against loneliness
I see the ocean
that has enveloped the planet
I hear the ocean
calling me home.
Luis Neer is an alumnus of the 2014 WV Governor’s School for the Arts and will be attending the West Virginia Writers’ Workshop at WVU this month. As of 4 June 2015, he is sixty-four pages into Infinite Jest. Some of his most recent publications can be found in Squawk Back; Maudlin House; The Rain, Party & Disaster Society and elsewhere.
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