Privacy Can Suffocate Poem by gershon hepner

Privacy can suffocate
but company can make me wince,
so when I want to celebrate
I try politely to dropp hints
to company that I would rather
desert in silence than remain
around me while I try to gather
my thoughts, refusing to complain,
for though I suffocate alone
to stay with company is worse,
and I would rather pick a bone
in camera with myself, in verse.

Robert Lowell composed a poem, inspired by a statue by Saint-Gaudens in Boston. It is called 'For the Union Dead' and was quoted in an article about literary tours of Boston, Cambridge and Concord, in the NYT, April 9,1999 (Will Joyner, 'Where Literary Legends Took Shape Around Boston') :

Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.
He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.

4/9/99