Week #2 Contagion
Week #3 Body and Soul
Week #4 Who Made the World
Week #5 untitled virus
Week #6 Without Us
Week #7 Trespassers Will
Week #8 Quarantine
Week #9 This Time
to be continued, unfortunately …
Week #1 Blessing Our Hands
As if water were holy,
as if our hands were miracles
we have just discovered
and learned to love and awe,
we wash them after touching
the world.
In rolling caresses,
intertwining fingers, nails
and knuckles, they work soap
into a lather with light from dead stars.
It is a simple baptism,
our mothers first performed for us.
We have continued its practice, forgetting,
perhaps, the insistence of love
as we squirmed to escape.
In our now threatened lives,
the import of washing our hands
has outgrown its innocent,
merely functional purpose,
like snails their shells, like snakes their skins,
like our baby selves
the amniotic embraces
our mothers gave.
So we practice this
simple ritual, to purify our hands
against galaxies of lethal taint
our eyes fail to see,
while the faucet sings in the key
of oceans and runnels, pouring forth,
whispering all and ever.
But even washing and believing
in the beauty of our hands,
cannot grace us with immunity
from the jellyfish sting of fear.
Passing my masked and unmasked
neighbors on the same earthly streets
we strolled so carelessly yesterday,
I nod, my eyes smiling bravely.
Forthcoming in The Comstock Review
Week #2 Contagion
We keep to the newly prescribed
physical distancing, when on
store lines; survival purchases
in our blue-gloved hands.
Floating above our masks, our eyes
give us away. Every expression
of doubt or fear becomes a tome
we all read and feel. We look tough
as egg shells, six feet apart, twelve
to a box we dare not drop. Time
slows to an intravenous
drip. Our eyes bear so much, floating
hope above our masks and this tide
of contagion raging all around our lifeboat.
Forthcoming in So It Goes:-The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library
Week #3 Body and Soul
Aristotle said we are just
matter imbued with souls, goldfish
swimming, each in its own bowl,
thoughts, streaking meteors,
galactic confines of mind,
capillaries, membranes and flesh,
in short, alive in every way
a seashell is not.
The soul knows all we will ever need
to know about sheltering in place.
But the flesh knows viruses,
knows their sudden, rapacious ways,
the way fruit knows bacteria
and rot spotting its beautiful
body, its sensitive skin.
Aristotle surmised how we are
different from stones found on the road
to Athens or Sparta, or on sandy shores
of the Sea of Crete, or along the way
to any epicenter where a labyrinth
is being built to confine a coughing,
feverish, short-of-breath beast
that continues to infect and feast on
all it can touch.
But even Aristotle could not explain
or guess, where our souls go after
the minotaur dines on us and burps.
Week #4 Who Made the World
for CG
The phone rang, as it always rings.
Even Covid-19 could not change that.
A friend said a friend was dead,
but my thoughts embraced his wife –
barred from visiting, unable
to say a last face-to-face goodbye,
before the eternity without him.
In quarantine and alone, I grieved.
I held the phone, looking at it
as if there must be more to tell,
some thing more caught in digital
synapses between yes and no, between
then and now, between zero and one
who made the world bearable.
Forthcoming in So It Goes
Week #5 untitled virus
We barely recognize our lives.
We walk around looking
like overtired surgeons and nurses,
who deserve our thanks, a drink
and a place to cry. But first they must
come out from behind their masks to tell us
the worst news we’ve ever heard.
We are upright and conscious
and full of questions no one can answer.
Week #6 Without Us
1.
With the approach of a couple,
tethered to a dog and baby stroller,
my wife and I cross the street
to give the gift of more social
distance than the sidewalk allots.
A monitor keeps her in step
with her heart’s aerobic demands.
I walk to the cadence of a poem
you sent this morning, and the way,
in your letter, you said you favored
the world for the light
from the window you sat before,
though it was gray and chilling.
2.
Maybe, the weather conjured
a 19th-century painting
you’d like to see, if it exists,
of fishing smacks surging up
the East River, their sails billowed
beneath gulls banking on brine-scents
and screeching at morning’s prospects
for fish heads. A man watches
from the Promenade. You decide
it’s Walt Whitman.
Maybe, he walks out of the painting
and time, down over the Penny Bridge,
to eye the young seamen, their tight
pecks and bums. He’d have savored
their slang, too, and the talk of men
talking work.
Maybe, before returning
to the Eagle, by way of Grace
Court or Love Lane, he lingers
to appreciate some Brandt geese,
bobbing in gaggles, like buoys
on waves, with the tide coming in
under dusk, and only one bend
of the sun’s corona left in the sky.
3.
Maybe speaks for all that is
at once possible and in doubt,
like the man you think Whitman,
who maybe stops to appraise the work
of the boulder-shouldered salt marshes,
which are being rebuilt to blunt
the coming of more super-storms.
Once, as a Civil War comfort-nurse,
Whitman guessed the chances
of a young Union soldier surviving
his wounds, and cried
forever salting his vision
afoot with words and silences
and love.
4.
The coming of more super-storms
may paint us out of the picture,
within which our invasive ways
have tried to paint over nature.
5.
But before the next deadly super-storm
arrives, we are feeding the Corona virus.
Under a microscope, we see its cells
are shaped like a circle of fire, like on any
stovetop, but this is a Covid 19 circle
of fire. If you get it think of your body
as a pot containing oil and popcorn,
and when that fire under it
is hot enough …
6.
Still, each day, I walk out to read
the bewildered expressions
behind face coverings.
7.
We are living in the Anthropocene.
Viruses and storms are stirring
rock’s metamorphic memory
that goes back before Whitman,
before agriculture and imagination,
to what the Earth was like before,
and what it might be like, again,
without us.
Week #7 Trespassers Will
In a moment the ashes are made, but a forest is a long time growing. Seneca
The world once fit and protected
us, like these gloves we now wear
to armor ourselves against it.
O mother, have you abandoned us?
The earth was beautifully at peace,
until we cut down trees to farm it
and carved diamonds from its veins
to make finger rings sparkle.
Now, the fox has nowhere to run,
the deer, raccoons and bears all
come closer, though there is nothing
older than their fear of our ways.
Sheltered at home we are homeless,
while a virus roams our empty streets.
Week #8 Quarantine
Today, I will rearrange this room.
Not by moving furniture or walls,
but myself without. Within,
I can not escape that I am
an egg timer, rooted and slipping away.
As a dancer reconfigures
space, erasing its confines,
and as constellations parcel
eternity into narrative
crossings, I will make everything
dance today, like dust
in a shaft of sunlight.
With imagination and muscle,
I can discover the depth of my cup
and saucer, bowl and spoon, I can be
spaghetti-straight then limp and saucy.
I can move with the uncorked wine,
dancing with light from the bottle
to the glass to imprisoned laughter;
all without leaving my room.
With the loose-limbed grace and courage
of a matador, I can turn the tables
and chairs from turning me
into their wooden selves. With a close-in
fan of cape-work and a quick pivot
to keep me just out of range of the horns
of the bull that, like a virus, might tame me,
I can animate this quarantine.
But after the olés and deep bows,
after humbly waving his torero’s cap
in a bravely ungloved hand,
even the bullfighter must return
to his rooms and the gathering dark,
to lay his body down.
Week #9 This Time
We learn a lot by imagining
what each other’s lives are like,
beyond the parallel tracks
our trains run on, like thoughts on language,
like our lives on time. So I know shagbark
hickories call you back the way Brownsville
trolleys ring for stops I reached
for and still do in melancholy moments.
It’s raining here in the city,
while you’re being snowed in upstate.
Yet a flood of contagion washes
over us both, confined and distanced,
and one wonders what it will take
to save us from ourselves this time.
______________________
to be continued, unfortunately …