Eating Out Alone

The loneliness inside me is a place,

Harvard where no one might always be someone.

When we're alone people we run from change

to the mysterious and beautiful--

I am eating alone at a small white table,

visible, ignored...the moment that tries the soul,

an explorer going blind in polar whiteness.

Yet everyone who is seated is a lay,

or Paul Claudel, at the next table declaiming:

"L'Academie Groton, eh, c'est une ecole des cochons."

He soars from murdered English to killing French,

no word unheard, no sentence understood--

a vocabulary to mortify Racine...

the minotaur steaming in a maze of eloquence.