A Neighbor Poem by Daniel Brick

A neighbor walks quickly passed me
at the entrance of our apartment building.
He greets me with a minimal statement,
no welcome this day, and holds the door open
so we go in opposite directions. A missed
opportunity? He is a man of extreme self-
possession. His solitude, I sense, is peopled
with vibrant thoughts, it's never an aloneness.
He can surely think his way out of moods:
they may descend upon him or well up within
with the force of animal instinct, but his mind's
keenness resists that surge, whether from outside
or inside. His thoughts, I assume, are Hamlet-like:
they not only occupy time so its shadows vanish
but dull its duration, so his mind floats freely
above immediate sensation and twists thoughts
into patterns that carry more weight than routine
thinking. Still solitude is his house, firmly built,
sturdy, a refuge from cant and the false machinery
of the world. With Hamlet's godlike reason, looking
before and after, he grasps the whole of things.
Someday I will insist we two talk through that pattern.