CORONAVIRUS: POETIC PROSE AND A POEM FOR A PANDEMIC

April is National Poetry Month.  I have to admit I have some dificulty with poetry; I think I’m too literal, too analytical.  But I do love prose with poetic images that can be visual or auditory, even olfactory.  And there’s been some beautiful imagery wrought by the coronavirus out of fear, suffering, and uncertainty.  So just gonna slip in here under the wire of National Poetry Month with some poetic prose and a poem for a pandemic. 

From Under Europe’s Strictest Lockdown, the World is Only as Big as Our Windows, by Ben Ehrenreich, in The Nation:

So far I’ve been among the lucky, locked down in a small Barcelona apartment with two people I love, and lots of windows. The strictest lockdown in Europe went into effect here on March 16. Since then, except for five memorable strolls to the grocery store and increasingly leisurely expeditions to take out the trash, my world has shrunk to the narrow, intersecting streets I can see through the windows, the parked cars that never move, the slivers of sky above it all. Some days it all feels tiny, like the buildings are just stage props, two-dimensional, and the sky has been painted on. When it rains, the windows fog and the whole world contracts into a small, soft, wrinkled, box.

Other days, the sunny ones, the world feels huge out there, like this block really does still connect to other blocks, to other streets and other cities, other countries and continents, other worlds, to a future as well as a past.

In her own words, Cady Chaplin (above), RN at Lenox Hill Hospital, with photographs by her best friend Karen Cunningham, also an RN, in The New Yorker:

“When I wear a uniform, I put it on and take on my nurse self,” Cady Chaplin says. “But you lose your personal eccentricities, so I like to wear weird T-shirts underneath my scrubs, even if it’s just for myself.

“Sometimes, after my shift, I walk in my apartment, slide down the door, and cry,” she says. “After I take a shower, I can’t quite figure out what it is I am supposed to be doing. Coming down from these shifts, hearing codes all day on the intercom, it’s hard to get out of that fight-or-flight response. I’ve been eating a lot of salted black licorice.” She calls friends and paces the apartment. For exercise, she shadowboxes while holding cans of chickpeas in each hand and listening to Lizzo, Lil’ Kim, and Tierra Whack. Recently, Chaplin’s parents drove in from Long Island and dropped off Lucy, the family’s French bulldog, to keep her company. “It will be good to have another heartbeat here,” she says.

From A Temporary Moment in Time, by Karen Russell, in The New Yorker: 

Shakespeare did his finest work under quarantine, I keep hearing. I wonder how the Bard would regard today’s “craft hour” in our apartment, which ended after eight minutes. I’d Googled “easy art projects anyone can do,” and selected “DIY jellyfish.” We forged ahead, with the same delusional optimism that has fueled our recent “pantry meals,” when we have three of a recipe’s twelve ingredients. We had to improvise a little, since our shopping list had prioritized diapers, medicine, Clorox wipes, gallon bags of dour legumes and their party-girl cousins, coffee beans. Of the many things I’d failed to foresee: a need for googly eyes, hole punchers, and vials of glitter. We wound up with a Styrofoam coffee cup stabbed through with neon straws. “Mama, this is not a jellyfish,” my three-year-old son, Oscar, said, with a preternaturally mature sorrow.

***

Speaking of Shakespeare—he was the minister who officiated marriages of words that have endured to this day, weirs of metaphor that we still use when we go fishing for new truths, lines of poetry that nearly all English speakers repeat, as well as phrases so common we have forgotten their origin:

That way madness lies.

Wild-goose chase.

Into thin air.

Lie low.

We have seen better days.

***

A few months ago, in this same park, I’d look skyward at this hour to clock the moment when a great scattering of starlings begins to wheel as one. Called murmurations, these flocks gather in the purple Texas dusk. Spiky iridescent birds that stitch themselves into a single animate cloud. (Starlings are an invasive species; in 1890, a Shakespeare enthusiast released sixty starlings into Central Park, as part of a whimsical mission to introduce to North America every bird ever mentioned in Shakespeare’s works; today we have two hundred million.) These enormous flocks can execute sharp turns and vortical spins with a magical-feeling coördination. A thousand starlings bunch into a living fist over the trees, relax westward, shear away behind the eastern skyscrapers. With a kind of muscular clairvoyance, each bird seems to anticipate the movements of the others. What is deciding them? What permits a thousand autonomous actors to move as one body, at these unbelievable speeds?

A recent study described how these birds are able to “manage uncertainty in consensus”: “Flocks of starlings exhibit a remarkable ability to maintain cohesion as a group in highly uncertain environments and with limited, noisy information.”

***

…you might argue that humans have never been less like a flock than at this moment of voluntary isolation. But I also feel that our stasis is itself a kind of secret flight. Externally, we are all separating from public spaces, cancelling weddings and graduations, retreating into our homes. This physical separation belies what is happening on another plane: people are responding to the crisis with a surprising unity. More swiftly than I would have thought possible, hundreds of millions are heeding a difficult call to stay at home. It’s a way of soaring into formation. And yet “murmuration” seems like the right word for the great convergence of humans travelling through this time together, listening to the latest news with our whole bodies, alert to subtle atmospheric changes, making constant recalibrations in response to the fluxing crisis at speeds to rival the dervishing starlings. How rapidly we are adjusting our behavior, to protect one another.

From The Prophylactic Life, by Gary Shteyngart, in The New Yorker:

I drive by the houses of friends, their front parlors lit. Their lives look so toasty in the morning fog. Approaching my own house, I can see a stack of freshly laundered towels in the upstairs bathroom window and this places me in a deep, familial calm.

 ***

We are walking a lot more now. I walk about six miles every day, always trying out new routes, discovering unex­pected pastures brimming with muddy sheep. The weather is cold, with occasional intimations of spring. Everything is awaiting resurrection. I spend twenty minutes looking at an owl as she scans the horizon, west, south, east, north. I have never noticed the power of a squirrel’s jaw as she grips an acorn. Lord, please help me make something out of all this stillness.

From The New Calm, by Maggie Nelson, in The New Yorker:

The feeling led me to pull Natalia Ginzburg [above] down from the shelf; I felt a sudden need to reread “Winter in the Abruzzi,” an essay I consider one of the most perfect and devastating ever written. It’s only five and a half pages; I managed to read it while shepherding my son through another utterly chaotic, thoroughly well-intentioned Zoom class for second graders.

Ginzburg’s essay begins as a descriptive tale of a small Italian town in winter: cavernous kitchens lit by oak fires, prosciutto hanging from the ceilings, women who’ve lost their teeth by age thirty, deepening snow. Then, on the second page, Ginzburg tells us simply, “Our lot was exile.” She doesn’t say why, but it’s the early nineteen-forties in Italy, so we can imagine. She then tells us about her new life in the village with her young children and her husband, an anti-Fascist professor who writes at an oval table in their kitchen. We hear about their routines, their bitterness, their delights, and their trepidation, suspended, as they are, in a rich and eerie lull. The essay wears an epigraph from Virgil: Deus nobis haec otia fecit. God has granted us this respite.

And a respite it turns out to be, as the appalling, crystalline last paragraph of the essay makes clear: “My husband died in Regina Coeli prison in Rome a few months after we left the village. When I confront the horror of his solitary death, of the anguished choices that preceded his death, I have to wonder if this really happened to us, we who bought oranges at Girò’s and went walking in the snow. I had faith then in a simple, happy future, rich with fulfilled desires, with shared experiences and ventures. But that was the best time of my life, and only now, that it’s gone forever, do I know it.” The essay closes with a date, 1944.

***

The murder of Ginzburg’s faith in “a simple, happy future, rich with fulfilled desires” is cruel. It is also the sound of human lives cresting against material and mortal limits, of flesh grinding into history. Earlier in the essay, she drives the point home: “There is a certain dull uniformity in human destiny. The course of our lives follows ancient and immutable laws, with an ancient, changeless rhythm. Dreams never come true, and the instant they are shattered, we realize how the greatest joys of our life lie beyond the realm of reality.” I differ from Ginzburg in that I have never been able to look for (or find) any joys, great or small, beyond the realm of reality, whatever that means (I am reading her, after all, in translation). Or, at least, I haven’t yet. But her sense of ancient and immutable law seems to me spot on, and, in certain circumstances, a great relief.

I don’t mean to imply that there aren’t ten thousand reasons that we shouldn’t be where we are today, or that no one is responsible for the suffering at hand and to come. People are responsible, and we know their names. People were also responsible for the murder of Ginzburg’s husband, who went from writing at that oval table surrounded by his children’s toys to dying of cardiac arrest and acute cholecystitis in prison (the latter being a gallbladder infection likely brought on by torture). I only mean to say that, for those steeped in the belief that great calamity should not, cannot, be our lot—or that, if we work hard enough or try hard enough or hope hard enough or are good or inventive enough, we might be able to outfox it—it can be a relief to admit our folly and rejoin the species, which is defined, as are all forms of life, by a terrible and precious precarity, to which some bodies need no reintroduction.

I think I reached for “Winter in the Abruzzi” because I needed this reminder, I needed its stern and tender fellowship, which it delivered to me today across seventy-six years and 6,331 miles (much farther than six feet away). That the essay brought me to tears was not new. But this time, rather than weep for Ginzburg alone, I wept for us all, as we, too, bought oranges at Girò’s, and went walking in the snow.

 

From Eightyish, by Vinson Cunningham, in The New Yorker:

Outside, I imagine that each stranger’s head is crowned by a saint’s halo of fatal droplets, waiting to surf on one of my breaths into my body and cut through my lungs like a spray of glass.

From Music Will be Important, by Donald Antrim, in The New Yorker:

We’re all going to be spending some time alone now. I once spent the better part of a year by myself in my apartment. It was 2016. I was not under house arrest. I was not in quarantine. I was sick with what we and our doctors call major depression.

***

Sitting in my apartment in Brooklyn, that year when I couldn’t easily leave the house, I listened. I was always shaking and hyperventilating. I felt my body pressed down, as if by some weight that I could not see. It was a feeling of being crushed from every side. Maybe you’ve felt this. Maybe you’ve felt that you cannot stand straight, or make a smile. Sometimes I got up from the sofa and paced, but then I might stop to adjust the speakers, angle them a little. In? Out? Was I sitting the right distance away? I put my gear on platforms made to dampen vibration, and added big fat speaker cables. The music seemed incrementally to soften, and, as I fiddled with the system, it came to sound, to feel, more and more close. That’s how I think of it now: listening as intimacy. My shoulders dropped. The muscles in my neck and face relaxed. I breathed more deeply. I prayed and I wept. I stood at the window and watched the people on the sidewalk below, parents with children, groups of friends, neighbors bringing home groceries. I thought of all of us who, like me at that time, lived in danger and in fear, a fear that might seem inexplicable, yet also concrete and real. Who hides behind the curtain in the window across the street? And what about over there, or down the street? How many of us might we find on the block, the avenue, the neighborhood, the city, the land? How many of us were afraid to live, afraid to die? Dear God, take care of my brothers and sisters. Take care of our families. Take care of the people in hospitals and on the streets. Take care of our doctors and nurses. Take care of our war veterans. I was never a soldier, never went off to fight, but all through that year I cried for the veterans. They return home wounded.

I put on my records and prayed. I was, we could say, sitting in music. I wasn’t wired. I was wire. The sound waves were wire, and the air in the room was wire, and the walls were wire, and the books in their shelves were wire, and my body was wire. I found my communion with others who were alone. And I might notice, when I felt you near me, that I was tapping my foot, and that my thoughts were, for the moment, clear, and that I could smile, a bit. 

And finally, an actual poem, Transpirations, by Arthur Sze, who was born in New York City in  1950 and educated at University of California - Berkeley.  According to a critic, “Sze’s work is characterised by its unusual combination of images and ideas, and by the surprising way in which he makes connections between diverse aspects of the world. In his poetry he combines images from urban life and nature, ideas from modern astronomy and Chinese philosophy as well as anecdotes from rural and industrial America. In this way, he creates texts that capture and reflect the complexity of reality.”  In my view, Sze’s poem asks the right question of us at this time:  Have we lived with utmost care?  I want to answer, “Yes,” but the truth is, “I’m trying.”

TRANSPIRATIONS

Leafing branches of a back-yard plum—

branches of water on a dissolving ice sheet—

chatter of magpies when you approach—

lilacs lean over the road, weighted with purple blossoms—

then the noon sun shimmers the grasses—

you ride the surge into summer—

smell of piñon crackling in the fireplace—

blued notes of a saxophone in the air—

not by sand running through an hourglass but by our bodies igniting—

passing in the form of vapors from a living body—

this world of orange sunlight and wildfire haze—

world of iron filings pulled toward magnetic south and north—

pool of quicksilver when you bend to tie your shoes—

standing, you well up with glistening eyes—

have you lived with utmost care?—

have you articulated emotions like the edges of leaves?—

adjusting your breath to the seasonal rhythm of grasses—

gazing into a lake on a salt flat and drinking, in reflection, the Milky Way—

Keep it real!  And poetic.

Marilyn