Barbara Tramonte’s most recent poem to appear here was “Could We Be the Same?” (December 2018). 

Solitude
By Barbara Tramonte

Now that you can’t walk
I don’t shout, “Come here.”
That mole I see munching the
dahlias and rudbeckia in back
won’t be seen in a rush
to the window.
The cardinal, like a fire truck,
only belongs to a minute.
I’ve learned to gag the urge,
“Come quick!”

I am rehearsing for solitude
I see but I don’t tell.

Our union is brief
embedded in a long caesura
of solitary confinement.
Gone but not erased.