You will never be alone, you hear so deep
a sound when autumn comes. Yellow
pulls across the hills and thrums,
or the silence after lightning before it says
its names — and then the clouds’ wide-mouthed
apologies. You were aimed from birth:
you will never be alone. Rain
will come, a gutter filled, and Amazon,
long aisles — you never heard so deep a sound,
moss on rock, and years. You turn your head —
that’s what the silence meant: your’e not alone.
The whole wide world pours down.
This, in my opinion, is a poem about doubt and the reassurance that, even in your doubt, you are not alone. In this big world, with lots of unknowns, we see these awesome natural occurrences, colors of the leaves, silence before lightening, and the simple vastness of the Amazon, and we get the sense that there is more to the world than just ourselves. These occurrences are dependable and unchanging. In the last line of the poem, ‘The whole wide world pours down,’ it sounds like the world is literally opening up to let us know that we will never be alone.