Going to the Movies Alone
There will be no one to love tonight after Selma
when the credits have rolled and the lights undimmed
and I will go home to my defrosted pork chop
with canned apple sauce and our sweet cat Pillango
no doubt waiting for me in the driveway and I
will watch a little bit of CNN– a recap
of the O.J. Simpson trial– before going to bed with
a book of essays and a small beakerful of Grand Marnier
and I will speculate about tomorrow’s weather,
whether it will be snow or rain or some other wintry mix,
and I will think about my wife, asleep in the
small French village of Reillane, and I will turn down
the heat to 65 and stroke the cat goodnight and take,
as I do every night, my three pillows—one for the head,
one between the knees, and one (the most important)
my “hugging pillow”—against my body
and I will think of the psychologist Winnicott,
who said that the ability to be alone depends upon
the knowledge that someone is there, and I will fall asleep,
as the lucky and the blessed do, with the kind of dreams
in which Philip Roth shows up at my birthday party
and Leonard Cohen at my wedding, and I will not
be preoccupied with the meaning of my life, I will leave
the metaphysics to the metaphysicians and the agnosticism
to the agnostics, and I will only imagine that the credits
are still rolling, and the movie was directed by me.