Those Days of Weighted Solitude

    What one remembers is the autumn leaves,
The quiet avenues of Sunday morning
Weighed down beneath a quilt of rust and gold.
And, passing by the large, neglected houses,
Their porches slanting with locked bikes and couches
And occupants asleep still, having leased
Another hour till a headache stirred them,
The world itself seemed still and damp and sad.
    Along these ways, I’d drag myself, head bowed,
The leaf bed softening my steps to silence,
But bowed as well beneath the gravity
My weekly pilgrimage had taken on:
To hear the back door latch as it fell closed
Upon the darkness of the drowsing house,
And feel that solitude bear down on me
With absent weight, as I went off alone
To Mass. A few blocks down: the little church
With blunted turrets built of golden brick,
The shade of fallen leaves, and peaked with domes
Whose round tops balanced each a crucifix.
    I bore not just a sense of loneliness,
But sorrow and remorse, and would have gone
Alone, in any case, ashamed to share
With anyone this walk of half belief;
This sense of contradicting not the world,
But rather all the world that dwelt within me.
    So also, in the inner chapel’s darkness,
I’d sit alone, tucked in some pew’s far corner,
Amid the surge of families crowded in,
Their hymnals clattering downward with a thump,
While some child, squirming at his father’s shoulder,
Raised up at last a high and ceaseless wail.
I mouthed each prayer as if about to weep.
    I’d think of the apostles in their room,
Locked away with a wound of fear and failure.
And it would seem that I was there with them,
To pour out words at what had come to pass
In each of us. We did not understand,
But only could confess, the sense we bore.
    Then, heading back again, down that same path,
The Eucharist a dry taste in my mouth,
A sting upon my brain still heating me,
I’d wonder when this thing I had to do
Might seem less brittle. Would there come a time
I’d speak with golden tongue of all that glory?
Or, it not seem a glimmer swamped by darkness?
A time when every movement ceased to play
At parables about some inner mood?
    I did not know that there would be whole years,
Where neither grief nor joy could pound my chest,
And prayer came forth in one clean line of words
That carried nothing with it but its meaning;
The church itself seem bathed in neutral light,
My soul insensible in its detachment.
We do not always know when we’ve been blessed.