Sleepy Cheetah ..............................Owen Bissell

Te Lonesome Animal

free verse by David Huddle, White Family Writer in Residence

We are lonesome animals. We spend all life trying to be less lonesome.

-John Steinbeck And God stepped out on space, And he looked around and said: I’m lonely— I’ll make me a world.

-James Weldon Johnson

So it comes down to us from this God who got shazzamed into the universe and who lost interest in playing with lightning bolts and designing girafes and beetles—

this God who sounded out lone-ly to describe the hitch in his pulse, his hunger for food he’d never tasted, his restless eyes scanning paradise and fnding it somehow lacking—

this God whose feet kept tripping him up with dance moves, this God who wanted to touch something that would touch back, this God who wept when wolves and coyotes answered him with sounds

that shivered his bones. And then this God got it! Lone-ly meant alive. Lone-ly was divine.

…I in my north room dance naked, grotesquely before my mirror waving my shirt round my head and singing softly to myself: “I am lonely, lonely. I was born to be lonely, I am best so!”

-William Carlos Williams

60 Te Talon 2022