The Lonely Humans, and: Time, Rampant and Flourishing

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The Lonely Humans, and: Time, Rampant and Flourishing Jennifer Chang (bio) The Lonely Humans About solitude, I don't need proofit's lost. Outside, the rain practicesloss, is losing to infinitude. Now there'sa river the city can't contain, rushingagainst the wishes of infrastructure.I know these streets, and then I don't.I carry my child with the current,and we are the rain, the falling songand the song of rain. Have I ever felthappier. Felt the human wrongnessof crossing human streets, carsstalling on waterlogged curbs. I had thought words could makenew oceans, my thoughts tiltingabove all like a lighthouse. Suchsovereignty, bearing a lightneither wave nor sail could regard,my goddamn power ablazein the peerless dark. Bicycles goingnowhere. The noise of strangerssoundless in so much rain. To survivewhat must perish: if we want,want not as water wants, to floodand to fathom us, our perishing. [End Page 193] Time, Rampant and Flourishing Certain forests, like this one, invokethe twentieth century, though this is not a forest but a city park, land cordonedfor natural recreation—a manmade stream,black willow trees loved by honeybees, paper-white moths,and so loved by the wood thrush. Often a trailis taken with little thought as to wheretime leads, what place permits the bodyto think and be [End Page 194] more, then who measures the centuries anddoes a forest conclude?This one, tucked away like a dream, belongs first to the municipalityand then to a population of white-tailed deer, some say rampant,some say flourishing. Once it belongedto a senator of a western state, who set a small stone housenear that loamy clearing. He found these trees peculiar. Hardwood, deciduous,not unlike the woman he loved but would notmarry. Why not? It was a different century.Consider the tree of heavenconsider the bamboo. What is not nativetakes over, and here their roots tangle [End Page 195] underfoot, form an unexpected grove,an alteration within all this green. The senator's househas turned now into a heap of ruin. Otherwise unremarkable,he was not so prosaic as to wed himself to habit: how easilybeing young can be a habitof being wrong, of writing lettersonly to hear one's own voice. Love is hardbecause who it affirmsis not always the loved one, is not always the lover, so what does it affirm?I used to never care about affirmation. I merely followed younight after nightuntil one morning I grew tired [End Page 196] of particularity and was alone. Does it matter, then,that the senator never married, dithering instead between such mute trees,which, yes, we may have passed once,tenderly, and a meadow of copious grasses, the names becominga secret lexicon, each name a blade of law. It is a parkor it is a forest. It is olderthan any heart. [End Page 197] Jennifer Chang jennifer chang is the author of Some Say the Lark, which received the 2018 William Carlos Williams Award. She is the poetry editor of New England Review and teaches at the University of Texas in Austin. Copyright © 2021 Yale University