GALWAY KINNELL

7

When one has lived a long time alone,

one likes alike the pig, who brooks no deferment

of gratification, and the porcupine, or thorned pig,

who enters the cellar but not the house itself

because of eating down the cellar stairs on the way up,

and one likes the worm, who by bunching herself together

and expanding works her way through the ground,

no less than the butterfly, who totters full of worry

among the day lilies, as they darken,

and more and more one finds one likes

any other species better than one’s own,

which has gone amok, making one self-estranged,

when one has lived a long time alone.

9

When one has lived a long time alone,

and the hermit thrush calls and there is an answer,

and the bullfrog head half out of water utters

the cantillations he sang in his first spring,

and the snake lowers himself over the threshold

and creeps away among the stones, one sees

they all live to mate with their kind, and one knows,

after a long time of solitude, after the many steps taken

away from one’s kind, toward these other kingdoms,

the hard prayer inside one’s own singing

is to come back, if one can, to one’s own,

a world almost lost, in the exile that deepens,

when one has lived a long time alone.

10

When one has lived a long time alone,

one wants to live again among men and women,

to return to that place where one’s ties with the human

broke, where the disquiet of death and now also

of history glimmers its firelight on faces,

where the gaze of the new baby meets the gaze

of the great granny, and where lovers speak,

on lips blowsy from kissing, that language

the same in each mouth, and like birds at daybreak

blether the song that is both earth’s and heaven’s,

until the sun rises, and they stand

in the daylight of being made one: kingdom come,

when one has lived a long time alone.