Meditation 39

14 April 2020

A new SUV appears in a neighbor’s stall, wearing a combat vet license plate. The property manager kicks rocks off the sidewalk. Torrential rains last night (after-image of waterfalls). Nothing happens in this book, a student says of Midwinter Day; it’s just a lot of nothing. Another was jealous of her ordinary life: her life is injury. It’s not boredom or trauma, but a pendulum that can’t help itself.

Who did it? Radhika asks, on awakening. It’s not that kind of show, we tell her; it’s a mystery, but of a different kind. I, too, fell asleep. Did he escape? I ask. No, not in this episode, Bryant answers. The locked-in residents of nursing homes die without tally. He has flattened the curve by not counting them. A patient suffering psychosis understands the press conferences no better than we do.

The engine of detail merely hums. Less energy to drive the car, if car can be read as poem, poem as meditation, meditation as the place where details go to mean something, anything. The tone of his saxophone was not moral, even if he was. Do not assign ethical qualities to sounds, even when they vibrate inside us as love.

Our neighbor is a cop; his dog needs surgery upon surgery. They’ll do the surgeries for free, but the anesthesia is $750 a pop. She’s had three already, and sometimes seven won’t get it done. She pulls and pulls at her leash; she’s strong, he says, though he has to water down her food. There is an end to this, but no one brings it up. It’s a systemic problem. Her body doesn’t hold. His lungs were ravaged by the virus. The paper sees fit to print an old photograph of him smiling.

We will all know someone who died of it. The mystery isn’t who, but how it happens that we’re taken. The touch of hand to hand exchanging money or a ticket. The breath on your neck in the subway. The jogger who goes sweating by. We aren’t suspicious of each other so much as of each other’s bodies, their excess breath, their unknowing.

If we’re alive next year. That phrase requires a comma at the end, though we work toward the final period. Grammar still holds, doesn’t it? Or is possible death's a new dialect we’re learning to speak, noun by verb by declension? Who’s got the possessive in this case; do we own our death, or it us, or is this not the question to ask. And of whom?

Career is quantification. Always a nominalization to make the character count go. Character is qualification, but not in that sense. It’s the start of a sentence that doesn’t end because there’s no predicate in this tongue. Williams wrote poems on his prescription pads. We have no drug to stop this illness, just ventilators and time. “You’re not supposed to go into your patients' rooms and find them dead,” a nurse said on television, weeping.