Alicia Hokanson

Naming the Solitude

Scent of low tide on the breeze
and morning’s birdcalls. A brightness
rising behind the trees.  Fir spire

by fir tip ringing the blue stillness.
Cloud brick by cloud wisp, compile the sky—  
this one a vertebra, this one a twist of hair.

So, sense by sense, convene a new day:
house drenched in quiet, 
he still absent from his chair.

This year I’ve learned to name this seclusion,
loneliness.  Not my calm self-sufficiency.  
The cedar deck is darkened by night rain.  

Last evening, I walked to the beach an hour
before sunset, the sun behind a cobbled wall
of cloud, the bay a full bowl the shore sipped from.

No one on the long sweep of beach, 
just the new crop of drift logs from winter's storms. 
Two boats tied to white buoys: a still life.  

My neighbors are gone—the dear old ones, dead. 
We are the elders now, their children
and I, who come to the quiet of sunset

to watch the bay fill with a pearl grey light 
touching all that changes, 
and all that does not change.

Reading Shih-wu

In the white dawn, 
the cat scratches at the screen 
singing out her desire for cool morning air.

In this clamor, my sleep won’t return,
so I rise to let her out, make tea, 
turn on music and furnace heat.  

I have no coals to scratch together for fire,
no bamboo flute, just some dials to spin
for my century’s common pleasures.  

You spent 40 years on Red Cloud Peak 
watching mists and plum blossoms,
wind and snow, gathering firewood,

planting yams.  Passed whole days
gazing at the mountains 
until they faded into blue dusk.  

How many mornings left here to watch 
the bladed leaves of the rhododendron 
shine with rain?  Weighted with wet, 
the lilacs bend over the fence.

The cat, my own Zen master, goes out
into the bright morning, comes back in
to loll on the chair, her full attention given
to washing her long white feet.

Back to Issue X…