In Lijiang, the sign outside your hostel
glares: Ride alone, ride alone, ride
alone - it taunts you for the mileage
of your solitude, must be past

thousands, for you rode this plane
alone, this train alone, you'll ride
this bus alone well into the summer night,
well into the next hamlet, town,

city, the next century, as the trees twitch
and the clouds wane and the tides
quiver and the galaxies tilt and the sun
spins us another lonely cycle, you'll

wonder if this compass will ever change.
The sun doesn't need more heat,
so why should you? The trees don't need
to be close, so why should you?



About this poem
"'Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles' is taken from a sign I found outside a hostel in Lijiang, China, a beautiful city in the Yunnan province. It was a sign with the English phrase, the number 2418 and Chinese characters, which were indistinguishable to me. I imagine traveling for 2,418 miles alone, and at the time, I think I'd traveled even further than that, going halfway around the world in utter silence. The beauty and loneliness of those experiences will stay with me my whole life, and that's why I wrote this poem."
-Sally Wen Mao

About Sally Wen Mao
Sally Wen Mao is the author of "Mad Honey Symposium" (Alice James Books, 2014). She teaches at Hunter College and lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

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(c) 2015 Sally Wen Mao. Originally published by the Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate