Meditation 48

29 April 2020

“Are you sure you want to discard recovered data?” Loss as act, rather than simple arrival at the door. They are dying in the ambulances; they are dying in the corridors; they are dying in their beds. No one to hold their hands. Some are dying by their own hands. Not trained to witness collapse without tools to prop up beams, navigate dark passages, fix the hard drives. Look into the middle of your brain and install a light. Move the light to your heart. I see a wavering candle, but it smells inappropriate, so I concentrate on only one nostril at a time. They say the swab is painful. Perhaps so is the mask, given our vice president refused to wear his. The privilege of flouting privilege. Killing machines have been privatized; immigrant labor does the essential work of providing us meat. The mistake was to count their dead. On her walk she--Jewish--passes the crematorium, sees and smells smoke. Context is everything, my daughter tells me when she doesn’t get a joke. Contact comes of old context; one woman says she hasn’t touched another human being in six weeks. Isolato is a significant word in American literature. Or isolate, as noun. The contagious hospital blossoms into meaning. We are given photographs of brutal buildings with square windows; sometimes we even get inside to see the nurses dance. It’s the voices that sound crushed, toneless, tuneless, a drone coming out of the bardo’s waiting room. As stylish as any waiting room, this one is small, so only one person can sit in it at a time. It smells of disinfectant, like the bank. What we take out is not food or funds, but ourselves, alone. Some doctors put photographs on their gowns, because you cannot see their faces otherwise. The photograph will not hold your hand, but it smiles at you. His brother fought the system and allowed a man to die while on Facetime with his family. It was some relief. The word is “closure,” like a door or a curtain, but we don't know what we close in or out. “We will all need help,” a Houston nurse says on her front porch. Her husband lets her know she survived the day, can keep counting down. Houston, we have a problem. One astronaut said he felt death in their capsule, though they made it to the blue Pacific. Astronauts and POWs came off planes with wobbles in their steps. Some things are better now, my neighbor says, because we’re not driving. The earth is being cleansed. They want us back at work so we’ll forget this time alone with our thoughts, breathing in the air. A weed whacker starts near my lanai, and I note that it was once upon a time a sign of progress. No need to pull a rake, or lean over. No need to touch the earth. Hear it sing, its gasoline engine and flailing wire. Watch the greenery explode in air. Do you want to watch another old baseball game, my son asks me, and we agree we’d prefer not to.