Instead of lecture notes I’ve been writing letters to my students, and in a recent one, I reminded them (and myself) that poetry is inherently social. I spent the past few days cleaning the attic in order to set up my home office (card table, laptop, and stack of books). While dusting, the last two stanzas from Donald Justice’s “Bus Stop” looped in my head:

             And lives go on.
             And lives go on
             Like sudden lights
             At street corners

             Or like the lights
             In quiet rooms
             Left on for hours,
             Burning, burning.

When I memorized this poem in graduate school, I loved it for its rendering of isolation. It was a poem about alienation, from each other but also the self: “These lives we lead / But do not own—.”

Now, I type alone at my desk but watch when my neighbors emerge from their red door to walk their dog. I watch for their return then note when the upstairs light turns on in my other neighbor’s house. There are no images of people in “Bus Stop,” but evidence of our existence abounds in the lights we leave on, in the umbrellas we open like “Black flowers, black flowers.” What I see now that I didn’t ten years ago is that the speaker is not, as I had thought, turning away from the world. Instead, they lean forward, longing for contact. When I run the poem in my head, the enjambment after the repetition (“And lives go on / Like sudden lights”) still surprises me, how the poem continues. Instead of shutting down, the poem reaches out.

Donald Justice, Collected Poems. Knopf, 2004