Saturday, June 16, 2012

Solitude with an Age Bias


Keats and Twain were tailored
from different cloth,
but on solitude, they agreed.
Twain named it contemptuous
when his neighbors
turned against him,
their hardness cutting
him to the quick, that soft
flesh below the growing nail.

It would be his hands that suffered,
his writing intricately interwoven
with his sense of self, a singular fabric.
His was the solitude of age, life
betraying life, scissors cutting
errant patterns for ill-fitting
garments.  For the youthful Keats,
solitude was the vestment
worn by a suitor kindred seeking.

No comments:

Post a Comment