The Lonely Poems
by Sébastien Luc Butler
Say I was lonely; say I was American.
Say I thought my loneliness American particularly.
Say I went to the woods to live deliberately. Say
the woods couldn’t give a shit. Deer ruminating
a circle around me, boxing in their speckled young.
Say I carried stones in my pockets in hopes
one day they’d become birds. Say I was as reckless in fables
as my country; the mess my country
made of me; in the front yard, sifting the mess I’d made my country.
Daybreak: song of a bird I don’t know
& soon will never have to. Many years ago,
a friend’s older brother tried to teach me
how to stone a finch from its tree, to fall leaf-stunned.
A boy beside another boy putting a stop to beauty
& calling it order. I’ve been speaking of wings,
of weight, of burden, of flight, which is
the closest this time around we get to transcendence;
only thing I’ve truly ever begged to; head bent,
knees grinding earth begged. To be more than
a rustle in the rafters. To explode sudden
into plume, a whole roost within awoken—
one after one, like pebbles from a gizzard—
to pull a string of finches out the smokestack of my neck.
Each a wet fist, each a glistening yellow apple—
what we were taught to call golden delicious.
That a thing could be known by others
by what it was inside to itself. This, at times,
enough of a miracle. As mystifying
as the haze on the hottest day of your life, watching
that bird’s sweet dart across withered hay & trying
to guess which branch it will call to for its landing.
I don’t remember where this poem originated from, except that it was one of those rare blessings that happens so rarely—it came out largely whole and complete. The one bit I remember adding in later is the line about stoning the finch, which now seems to me the central image of the poem. To fall leaf-stunned contains the piece’s shape—falling through memory, through inner landscape, through something as gargantuan and ungraspable as the American psyche. That was, in part, the aimed subject of this poem. Though such an aim always returns much more to a poet’s individual psyche, or whatever fugue-like splinter of the self the “speaker” enacts.
I know a poem is close to done when the language takes on a life of its own. Some quality within it feels self-sustaining. Leave the poem inside a drawer and it would still be there ticking, alive. This usually happens when I get my ego out of the way and trust my images, let them web together the poem’s meaning. Letting language take the driver seat has a way of foregrounding unconscious or semi-conscious cultural connections. That happened here with goldfinches and with the color yellow, which led to apples. I think Johnny Appleseed was the first story I ever really internalized. I didn’t grow up going to church or knowing that cosmology. But the apple was always there and feels very American—as does a certain kind of violence I internalized as a boy. The live deliberately line echoes Thoreau, whose thinking I frequently find myself inside. That’s what having been raised in this country feels like to me—to be enveloped by or stuck inside something awful. Awful in the old, classical sense. Birds in cages, Icarus in the tower. Fable always delivers us to some kind of truth, and a country is the biggest of fables, imaginary and real at the same time.
Much has been made or not made from the “male loneliness epidemic” in America. For me, a lot of those takes are frustrating. It’s real, but merely one branch of an illness that belongs to our whole country, deep at the root. We’re the richest society in history and also one of the most isolated, atomized, lonely, and afraid. I find it important to write of masculinity because the cage we build our boys into and then call “men” is one where loneliness turns so often into violence. I’ll paraphrase Robin Coste Lewis who said essentially don’t tell me the world is messed up in a poem. I already know that. Tell me how you are messed up as well. I actually haven’t written any more “Lonely Poems” other than this one. Maybe more will come, or maybe not. In a way, you could say every poem I’ve ever written is a lonely poem.
Sébastien Luc Butler was born and raised in Michigan. He is the author of Sky Tongued Back with Light (Black Lawrence, 2026) and Viscera (Four Way Books, 2027). His poems have appeared in Narrative, Pleiades, Bennington Review, Black Warrior Review, and Indiana Review. A Poe/Faulkner Fellow in Poetry while at the University of Virginia, Butler currently works as an editor for The Adroit Journal and lives in New York City.