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The God of Loneliness

It’s a cold Sunday February morning

and I’m one of eight men waiting

for the doors of Toys R Us to open

in a mall on the eastern tip of Long Island.

We’ve come for the Japanese electronic game

that’s so hard to find. Last week, I waited

three hours for a store in Manhattan

to disappoint me. The first today, bundled

in six layers, I stood shivering in the dawn light

reading the new Aeneid translation, which I hid

when the others came, stamping boots

and rubbing gloveless hands, joking about

sacrificing sleep for ungrateful sons. “My boy broke

two front teeth playing hockey,” a man wearing

shorts laughs. “This is his reward.” My sons

will leap into my arms, remember this morning

all their lives. “The game is for my oldest boy,

just back from Iraq,” a man in overalls says

from the back of the line. “He plays these games

in his room all day. I’m not worried, he’ll snap out of it,

he’s earned his rest.” These men fix leaks, lay

foundations for other men’s dreams without complaint.

They’ve been waiting in the cold since Aeneas

founded Rome on rivers of blood. Virgil understood that

death begins and never ends, that it’s the god of loneliness.

Through the window, a clerk shouts, “We’ve only five.”

The others seem not to know what to do with their hands,

tuck them under their arms, or let them hang,

naked and useless. Is it because our hands remember

what they held, the promises they made? I know

exactly when my boys will be old enough for war.

Soon three of us will wait across the street at Target,

because it’s what men do for their sons.

www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2008/05/05/080505po_poem_schultz