Meditation 37

11 April 2020

The question of grief. She argues the word is being misused. But did we not grieve for the 9/11 jumpers before they hit the ground? An edifice stands, but we see it shift, begin to fall. Those inside are still alive, but we’ve begun to grieve. This happens on repeat on the news. He said he watched the towers fall only once; I took that to mean he wasn't stained by repetition. Which is grief inflated, til it pops.

The other main character is a balloon, the enforcer. It roams the sea and this small town where our other main character is imprisoned. He has a telephone with a cord, which dates him. The balloon is a drone before the fact, one that grazes surfaces; we see it from the town’s helicopter, which hovers. Something about hovering in poetry, or coming between, or refusing to take the side of strict chronology or episode.

That’s to get far away from the central facts. The virus kills thousands a day, but the president’s tv ratings have gone up. His incompetence offers some relief from our grieving. 

He doesn’t do metaphors well because he thinks the wall must be real. He thinks that closing the country down means someone shut the door, whose lock can now be picked. A chaplain a dying man asked her to call his brother to apologize for an old argument. The shuttle has been cocked. She does her diplomacy on behalf of the dead. And grieves that no family members are there.

Define “immediate family.” The immediate of time, or immediate of space, or immediate of blood or other kin. She loved her father but doesn’t appear in his credits, as she was step-. He walked home one late night after a gig so she could buy shoes the next day. What we do for later-to-be-erased love, because the titles don’t fit.

The agreement fell through because the US wanted a particular name for the virus, having to do with its location of origin. Others cared less about location than about the novelty of the thing, or the year it came out like an infected bloom. It was like “genocide,” a word no one could define well enough to use properly. Definition must be more than context, no?

Forgive us our daily nattering. Forgive the dog her bath in the sun, the cat his barf in the bowl, the other cat her pee on a blanket, and the other other cat his claws in the screen door. Forgive us our sins of omission. We leave abject terror to others. The faces of ER doctors look at us through bruises their masks made. A Sharpied date lets you know how many time the mask has been worn.

We are witnesses who cannot testify. One doctor taped a photograph of himself on his jacket. All the dying man could see was a mask inside a mask inside a garbage bag.