I draw solitude over me . . . the hawks

and the gulls are never breakers of solitude.

    Robinson Jeffers, "Prelude"

Not the granite cliffs of Carmel but half

A continent and a hundred years away,

Prelude is not a word I have considered

Except as music, never thinking now

That one thing need precede another in

The learning of living my last years here 

In solitude of the present and presence

Or absence of all that comes and goes

In my staying, part of a place in a way

That I have never been, as perhaps youth

Never can or need to. 

                                    After three days

Of storms there is only distant thunder,

No longer premonition but resolution,

The last of the rain falling from eaves,

The wind-knotted willows untangling,

The sky opening into distance again,

Clear and cloudless in its stillness.

The hawk-perch pines, the eagle-oak

Empty now, though the cries will come

Again in their own time, and then mine,

Saying something about hunger and desire

I thought I had left behind, not to break

My solitude but to allow me into theirs.