Solitude: To Be

In the back
corner of my closet
there is a plaza of moonlight
from a window the size of
my right hand
where I keep a staggered
pile of books with
thread trailing from their coarse jackets.
I curl behind the books at night
and become the wall,
white-washed in moonlight.
For one hour I am a simple kind
of lonely
and I do not know
questions or answers.

I am just a fly buffing its hands
against a clothes hanger
and a squirrel tunneling into insulation
and a loose shingle striking the roof
to the cadence of a December wind.
I am a spider drowning
in long stalks of carpeting
and a moth sleeping on the ceiling
like a chip in the wall.

The clothes
on the round plastic rack
are curtains between realism
and what lives in my head.
I sit
and watch them sway.