Meditation 27

10 March 2020

Those who don’t know history are condemned to repeat it, but there's no repetition, only contagion. What matter if the stock market crashes on truth or rumor, it crashes. Contain and contagion begin as cons. So does the president, and there he ends, red hat to orange hair, promising a stop because, after all, none of this ever began. Don’t buy the knife when the knife is falling at you, Bryant says of the stock market. All the stock tropes are trotted out for effect, including the woman who nods, the gray-haired man who stares ahead, and the other whose hand is on the president’s shoulder not as reassurance but as restraint. Contagion is circulation, like a public library whose books go from island to island, but always return to their home branch. Be sure to maintain social distancing and wash your hands constantly. An army of Lady Macbeths takes to the stage to show us how, and Weird Sisters stir their pots in steamy circles. We can’t see the gobs of blood, but we know they’re there, even if they smell more like strawberry jam from the lower seats. It’s the tone we can’t tune, frantic oscillations between serious and absurd panic, this being punked by a germ that resembles my dog’s spiky ball. When she pushes it with her nose, it squeaks. Plastic laughter to match organic. She used the word to mark her illness on a grocery list, while others wrote “toilet paper” ten times on the blackboard, vowing not to buy the last roll again. The central scene—Stalin’s death—is funny, but digressions are pure horror, which leads me to wonder how regression fits. We regress from the serious center in the dull suburbs, except in this case, where Siberia's suburbs are central to the moral panic. I cast my eye to the side to see the word count jump. When I asked the older man how he was, he turned his eyes to the right, away from mine. His wife needed surgery after a fall in the night, then he’d been carjacked at the end of a shotgun in Hilo. Even I recognized the female perp in the paper; her second carjacking in nearly as many months. His practice kept him calm; he got their license plate number. His new role is to care for his wife, learn to cook and clean. The newspaper refers to him only as “the elderly man” so often it becomes a mantra for his presumed incapacity. One section of the book ends with the word “perfidy”; it has to do with “chance movement,” which either gives or takes away. The seeming chance in a sestina enables the poet to begin in this world and then to make it dream. The garden you see outside the house is drawn in by the inscrutable child.