American Solitude

By Grace Schulman

“The cure for loneliness is solitude.”
—Marianne Moore

Hopper never painted this, but here   

on a snaky path his vision lingers:

three white tombs, robots with glassed-in faces   

and meters for eyes, grim mouths, flat noses,

lean forward on a platform, like strangers   

with identical frowns scanning a blur,

far off, that might be their train.

Gas tanks broken for decades face Parson’s

smithy, planked shut now. Both relics must stay.   

The pumps have roots in gas pools, and the smithy

stores memories of hammers forging scythes   

to cut spartina grass for dry salt hay.

The tanks have the remove of local clammers   

who sink buckets and stand, never in pairs,

but one and one and one, blank-eyed, alone,   

more serene than lonely. Today a woman

rakes in the shallows, then bends to receive   

last rays in shimmering water, her long shadow

knifing the bay. She slides into her truck

to watch the sky flame over sand flats, a hawk’s

wind arabesque, an island risen, brown   

Atlantis, at low tide; she probes the shoreline

and beyond grassy dunes for where the land   

might slope off into night. Hers is no common

emptiness, but a vaster silence filled   

with terns’ cries, an abundant solitude.

Nearby, the three dry gas pumps, worn   

survivors of clam-digging generations,

are luminous, and have an exile’s grandeur   

that says: In perfect solitude, there’s fire.

One day I approached the vessels

and wanted to drive on, the road ablaze

with dogwood in full bloom, but the contraptions   

outdazzled the road’s white, even outshone

a bleached shirt flapping alone

on a laundry line, arms pointed down.

High noon. Three urns, ironic in their outcast   

dignity—as though, like some pine chests,

they might be prized in disuse—cast rays,

spun leaf—covered numbers, clanked, then wheezed

and stopped again. Shadows cut the road   

before I drove off into the dark woods.

Copyright Credit: Grace Schulman, “American Solitude” from Days of Wonder: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 2002 by Grace Schulman. Reprinted with the permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved, www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com.