The Etymology of Loneliness

Snow is falling sideways.
Given the title, one might assume I’m in crisis,
identifying with the weather as a cry for help.
That I have a disorder of loneliness and I’m spiraling downward
like the snow.
But the snow is gorgeous, born of unhuman hands,
its sudden arrival a white mirage.
Now a single black fly on the liminal windowpane.
Now flakes plummeting like humans whose parachutes malfunction.
And there’s more heft per flake,
like a thin person adding meat to their bones.

I sit indoors, a chilled spectator,
walls and doors between the snow and me.
Still in pajamas hours beyond accepted etiquette,
unless one has the flu.
I could easily pass for someone sick,
or someone given up on grooming.
To groom a horse is to love it.

Sylvia wrote God, life is loneliness, despite all the opiates.
I’m using her first name as if she and I were familiar.
What kind of a friend would I have been to not see the signs?
Does anyone see them in me?
If I were a fly on their walls (or a beatific butterfly
with camouflaging color-changing wings),
what might I hear them say (lament) about me?

She also wrote jealous of my loneliness, in the blue-silver
of the cold moon, shining brilliantly on the drifts of fresh-fallen snow.
I don’t comprehend, though I want to, what she meant by
being jealous of her loneliness.

Loneliness was once defined as solitary, lone; unfrequented.
I’m so excited by the idea of a person being unfrequented.
As if we could be a pub, a landmark, a swimming hole,
a sex worker, a meadow.

Joanne Dominique Dwyer’s collections of poems are RASA, chosen by David Lehman for the Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize (2022) and Belle Laide (Sarabande Books, 2013). Dwyer’s poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 2024 and 2019. Her poems have also been published in various literary journals including The American Poetry Review, The Common, Conduit, Copper Nickel, Kenyon Review, Massachusetts Review, New Ohio Review, Notre Dame Review, and Poetry.  She was awarded a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award before publishing her first book of poems. Joanne counts her time spent using poetry to interface and commune with folks in memory care units and with teens in rural areas of Northern New Mexico as her most important engagement with poetry. She is also a ceramic artist and mountain hiker.