Meditation 28

18 March 2020

A turtle’s tear, as the butterfly drinks it.

The problem is one of scale: word after word accrues a viral load, heavier before witnessed by the reader than afterwards. We toss the metaphor in the dumpster, but that’s an unclean box, prone to viral excess. Teaching on-line encourages other viruses to spread. A worm vomited bits of my poems to all my contacts: one got miscarriage, the other adoption. To talk on-line is to acknowledge abstraction, a pane of glass between a son and his famous father. The difference between a cat’s scream inside or outside the house. When the old woman died, she left behind a beautiful parlor, the gift of a Jewish girl she saved. Touch the brocade and carved wood and it disintegrates in maroon and gilded dust. Our losses were pre-conscious until the day all the emails came flooding in. It’s a big wave washing through, and it will be gone, the president said a week ago, before he started alluding to deaths and higher poll numbers. The Fed makes him happy. She'd closed her door on everyone to preserve her secret. It was a real door, but in the context of the novel, it was also symbolic. She closed her border to the alien intruder, the neighbor who sought meaning behind shutters and a garden wall. Meaning foreclosed declares bankruptcy, takes the house of our being and pulls it down from within. First comes the dry wall, and then the beams, everything but the shell. The house cries like a turtle, but no butterfly drinks. I’ve got ashes near the television and others in the closet. I don't know where to scatter them. A scattered brain is more conducive to anxiety than to accountancy. Everyone told her she was creative, but her mistake was not to become an accountant. She loved to count numbers as they went up and down in her checkbooks, the ones that would have been her memoir had we saved them. I’m left with a few lists of what she had for lunch. I want to account for my life and hers, but I can’t keep the numbers straight. The only job I was fired from was one that involved putting data into a spread sheet. She was like Crusoe but I live on the island to which you are dis-invited to visit. Do not drink at our bars, eat at our restaurants, fill our hospitals with your tourist asses. The grown girl had no time to visit her savior. The writer had no time to save the savior. The protagonist died on her way from the bed to the door. Remember, the poet advises, that suffering is your door. No angle will save you.