How will I remember quarantine?
By the shopping trips I didn’t take.
The concerts not attended.
The restaurants avoided.
Or what I did instead?
Call a cousin not seen in years. Bake
banana bread. Paint the bedroom pink.
Garden. Hike. Read. Sleep past 8 a.m.
Snuggle with an old man statistically
at risk to be gone in the next decade
whether he catches the virus or not.
Wonder if I inhaled each breath
with the honor it deserved.
Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s,
and to God the things that are God’s.—Matthew 22.21
“Standing at the swell of the muddy Mississippi
after the urgent care doctor had just said, Well,
sometimes shit happens, I fell fast and hard
for New Orleans all over again. Pain pills swirled
in the purse along with a spell for later. It’s taken
a while for me to admit, I am in a raging battle
with my body, a spinal column thirty-five degrees
bent, vertigo that comes and goes like a DC Comics
villain nobody can kill. Invisible pain is both
a blessing and a curse. You always look so happy,
said a stranger once as I shifted to my good side
grinning. But that day, alone on the riverbank,
brass blaring from the Steamboat Natchez,
out of the corner of my eye, I saw a girl, maybe half my age,
dressed, for no apparent reason, as Wonder Woman.
She strutted by in all her strength and glory, invincible,
eternal, and when I stood to clap (because who wouldn’t have),
she bowed and posed like she knew I needed a myth—
a woman, by a river, indestructible.”
Ada Limon, The Carrying: Poems (Milkweed Editions,
2018)
Above the azure inlet of the sea,
the path was steep, carved out between
It is a kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or toes. How soles of feet know
Where they're supposed to be.
I've been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?
Pat Schneider, Another River: New and Selected Poems (Amherst
Writers and Artists Press, 2008)
“Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.”
James Wright, Above the River: The Complete Poems & Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1990)
Which reminds me of another
knock-on-wood
memory. I was cycling with a male friend,
through a small midwestern town. We came to a
4-way
stop and stopped, chatting. As we started
again,
a rusty old pick-up truck, ignoring the stop
sign,
hurricaned past scant inches from our front
wheels.
My partner called, “Hey, that was a 4-way
stop!”
The truck driver, stringy blond hair a long fringe
under his brand-name beer cap, looked back and
yelled,
“You f---- n------!”
And sped off.
My friend and I looked at each other and shook our
heads.
We remounted our bikes and headed out of
town.
We were pedaling through a clear blue
afternoon
between two fields of almost-ripened
wheat
bordered by cornflowers and Queen Anne’s
lace
when we heard an unmuffled motor, a
honk-honking.
We stopped, closed ranks, made fists.
It was the same truck. It pulled over.
A tall, very much in shape young white guy slid
out:
greasy jeans, homemade finger tattoos,
probably
a Marine Corps boot-camp
footlockerful
of martial arts techniques.
“What did you say back there!” he
shouted.
My friend said, “I said it was a 4-way
stop.
You went through it.”
“And what did I say?” the white guy
asked.
“You said: ‘You f------ n------”
The afternoon froze.
“Well,” said the white guy,
shoving his hands into his pockets
and pushing dirt around with the pointed toe of his
boot,
“I just want to say I’m sorry.”
He climbed back into his truck
and drove away.
Marilyn Nelson, The Fields of Praise: New and
Selected Poems (Louisiana State University Press, 1997)
