Heartwood

Here is what I know of loneliness:
Go to the brick coffee shop underground
and sit in the middle.
Listen to the melody of conversation
wax and wane like tides
like feelings
like moons.
Now, pivot. Face away.
Put the voices behind you.
Learn the little world in its soundscape.
Pick a voice. Follow its trebles
until you know something of the
soul underneath. Then tell yourself
you know nothing of it at all.
Count the distance between where you are
and any person with a body
who knows your name.
Find the texture of your existence without it.
Briefly, it is exquisite.
Longly, it is a longing.
Conversation is sacred practice.
Naming is sacred talk.
It is the candles on the altar.
It is the careful carving of the pulpit,
porous wood
that catches speak in its openings,
tongues that a body can make no sense of
but that the body in the body
studies with such gust.
Study it.
Go to the university.
Find the cement bench built circled
around the tree
and sit.
Think of the architect student
who must of built it
who must of loved the tree so much
that they wanted it to always know company.
Be company.
Let the tree learn the bottoms of your feet
on its naked spine.
Love the tree yourself.
Love the tree so much that you want it
to know the inner ring of its being,
that tender place inside a self
that wants to be the little spoon,
wrapped in its sapwood and then in its bark,
a circle being circled,
a home being homed.
And this
this is what I know of loneliness.
It is a chamber in the heart.
It is a nest. It is a cave.
It is a crater been cratered.
It is a potbelly. It is a hole.
It is a hole to crawl into.
Crawl into.
Burrow there. Curl into its hollow.
Feel the soft body of its haze.
Rest.
Wake.
Rest wake.
Rest wake.
Become the rhythm.
Become the heart inside the heart.

taken at the University of Nebraska, October 2021