10 April 2020
Flight is a
seduction, and so is fight. The flight in a poem comes not after
fight but after bird-watching. We see the bird, then we ask it to
mean something more than bird. So we go all transcendentalist and
shit, seeing the sky inside our brain and populating it with song.
Sun Ra on the roof, synthesizing.
A friend posts photo
of her cousin in high school.
She asks for prayers. Her cousin has it, has caught it,
is imprisoned by it. We alternate between closing in and opening out,
quarantine and prisoner release. Whatever works, though none of us
does now, except single parents. The work sheets take time, but don’t
return it.
After the fires, she
said she’d lost her fight, then found it again. After the plague,
London burned. After a World War, the Spanish flu. Disasters
magnetize. He’s doing a great job, the best job, a sublime job, if
he knew the lingo. But he doesn’t do metaphor well.
More people out on
the sidewalks, but fewer of them talk. Choreography of avoidance, as
the road is a tennis court where we bounce back and forth, with or
without dog. There’s a yellow stripe to mark the absence of net.
The classes in communications are full, my daughter says, so she’ll
take disability instead. And business. I remember watching a spider
on her net for hours as she performed her deadly labor.
The net seduces, but
breath abandons the body. It was so hard to breathe, his boss told
him. He has to log every interaction he has with
people, even at six feet apart. Now they quarantine sailors before they
sail, because everyone always gets sick at sea. The net brings
together what we do apart. The president begins his presser with the
wall.
The mask disguises
emotion behind safety. You wear the mask for others, not yourself.
You do not tell them how you are, but ask after them. When you take
the mask off, wash it in soapy water. No soap! the demented woman
yelled. One disease kills off what the other disease hath wrought.
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