Pearl Inside

Alone on cold stone steps, a milling hubbub in the courtyard below, air quivering with impulse -- currents of new thoughts, strange fiction, eccentric poetry -- wildness in ferociously lush mountains on the Blue Ridge, a writers' retreat. July, 2008.

From within my mantle of introversion, I imagine the people below reconnecting from past gatherings are experienced novelists and poets with no interest in knowing me.

The poet Claire Bateman sits alone, a few feet away.

I inch closer, tell her I bought her collection Clumsy, was stunned by "Reprieve" about her absorbed twin, a pearl now joined in her bloodstream, swooning in the glare of sunlight, a loner who surrounds herself with loners . . .

. . . just as each pearl pierced through by the same golden chain basks in the luminescence of the others even as she secretly believes she's the only one suspended there, and whines, "I'm so lonely."

Our conversation strings together mutual experiences of withdrawal, cultivates shared delight in the delicacy of solitude.

The next day I sit solo, pondering my own vanished sister, the irritant of my otherness inviting layers of poem to form "If I Had Absorbed My Twin:"

She might walk
with one leg shorter
and disclose the reason
for my stumbling
into bedposts,
into prose.

Perhaps she'd suffer
from Tourette's,
thus justify
my intermittent
vocal tics,
my fuck-you frets.

Or synesthesia.
I would understand
sharp pain of sounds,
fine touch of words,
and dissonance's
bitter taste.

High sensitivity?
Ah, that explains
my shrinking
in the midst of crowds
my need to separate,
to fade.

My twin, a poet?
Then we're truly
joined in spaces
where the loneliness
of being strange
can't be explained.

December, 2017. Claire and I reconnect when I write about the radiance of her poetry, then discover our pearls still match, pierced by the golden chain of painting abstracts. Neither of us cares about distractions such as time-consuming fancy meals, and I imagine she, too, is surrounded by her easels, brushes, canvases, in every room a notebook and a pen. So I, as she, might find myself in any space with rhyming, sketching, scribbling, gluing, strata on strata, hue upon hue.