The Best American Poetry

Starting a Zuihitsu on (Un)deliveries [by Lera Auerbach]

Photo Credit: Lera Auerbach

(1)

At times like this, I feel sorry for postal workers.
It must be very stressful to be one.
To always have to sort things out while thinking of viruses.

One can easily distinguish a postal worker who thinks of viruses from the one who doesn't.
Those who think wear gloves and masks. But most of them do not; most of them are young and careless.

At the beginning of the pandemic, an entire hotel in China that was converted into a hospital for coronavirus patients had collapsed suddenly, killing everyone inside.
How does a building suddenly collapse? 
How does a human being? 
What is the breaking point? 
What is that something, usually insignificant in itself, that makes all the difference between life and death?

I think of Sylvia Plath.
How she returned to her dirty home (her housekeeper left), overwhelmed by unhappiness, with her two small children always in need of her care.
If she had returned to a spotlessly clean and welcoming house instead of a messy one full of dirty dishes and laundry, would she still have killed herself? 

Perhaps, but maybe not then.
Maybe the breaking point would still hold a while longer.

(2)

Last year there was a postal worker who was overwhelmed by his responsibilities of daily deliveries of packages.
He just had too many parcels to deliver to too many houses and not enough time allotted to do so.
Even if he worked past his hours, he still could not manage all deliveries and be often scolded by his superiors for the delays.

At first, he kept undelivered packages in the trunk of his car in hopes of delivering them the next day, but the next day he would have a new bunch of boxes, and soon the trunk of his car was too full.
After a while, he gave up on the idea of being able to deliver everything, so he left all packages he could not deliver in a shed next to his house. 

He hoped to deliver them one day when his daily load would be lighter, but such a day never came.
After a while, the shed was full of packages, and he had to keep the new ones in the garage.
He never opened the boxes.

In his mind, he never stole them, he just kept them for better delivery times.
It was not his fault that better times were slow in coming.

Nobody appreciated any of his past accomplishments (for he did make numerous safe and timely deliveries) when police discovered his shed and his garage full of packages belonging to other people.

He tried to argue that the packages didn't belong to anyone – they were still in transit on the way to their final destination, but some of them were in transit for over a year and, after all that time, were considered missing in action like lost soldiers.

(3)

Sometimes my poor head makes me feel like the trunk of this poor man's car with too many deliveries scheduled in too short a time, and I feel like giving up.

At night, I stare into all these packages in my head.
I try to imagine what lies within each.
I look at the names of people and imagine them as characters in my book. 

Then the clock chimes and reminds me that it is too late for everything.
Too late even to try. 

(4)

A dog doesn't know if something is too late. 
Unless it's related to food. 
Because, as far as a dog is concerned, food always comes too late and never too early.

(5)

Life is mostly unbearable. And full of wonders.
Partially, it is unbearable because it is full of wonders.
Just think of all the undelivered wonders the postal worker kept in his garage.

But many wonders would not fit into any packaging and can't be delivered because they are just too great. 

Like the night when Venus and the moon were so close together, and we sat on the bench next to the ocean and felt so happy about the present moment that it also felt sad. 

Great happiness is always sad because it overflows and spills into sadness; happy sadness because it is just too vast to stay happy.

The chorus of frogs after the storm is like that.
Also Gesualdo's music and the Montserrat cathedral – you almost hate it, it's so beautiful.

A good book feels like that: overflowing without beginning or ending, even without a middle, happening all at once and about everything and nothing in particular. 

The only thing that separates a good book from nonexistence is its two covers: that's not much of protection from nothingness, not much at all.

Viennese Traffic Lights [by Lera Auerbach]

In Vienna, they have same-sex pedestrian traffic lights.

Typically, traffic lights are sexist: they display a matchstick figure of a man that turns green or red and sometimes flashes nervously, trying to speed up pedestrians so that cars can start driving.

In Vienna, they replaced the matchstick man with two matchstick figures holding hands.
No, I mean touching hands since matchstick figures have no fingers. 

In some Viennese traffic lights, instead of a matchstick man, there is a matchstick woman figure. No curves, but a triangle of a dress. Instead of a flashing man, there is a flashing triangle of a woman or, even better, two women touching hands. 

Gay traffic lights appear only in the center of the most touristy areas.

"Such a progressive city," I thought.

"No," my Viennese friend Verena objected. "They are more intolerant than most; they just hide it better." 

My apartment in Vienna remains empty throughout the pandemic, and sometimes I imagine that a part of me lives there, but then I remember about the lockdowns and quarantines and feel gratitude for spending the pandemic away from any large cities – in the Middle of Nowhere, surrounded by nature.

With the flights cancelled, cars parked, restaurants closed, and theatres and concert halls paused in a year-long fermata, the traffic lights in Vienna remain working, touching invisible fingers of the matchstick figures made of lights and reminding us that human touch may still be possible again one day and isolation will not last forever.

 

From My Diary No. 3 – February 2020

 

Inner Voices – Oil on Canvas by Lera Auerbach

(1.)

I think of the mountain from Rafael's childhood.
Once upon a time, there lived a woman.
Her name was Soledad.
Nobody lives on that mountain now.
Nobody is left who remembers Soledad,
only Stella (Rafael's mother) and Rafael.
She's also in my memory.
And if you are reading this, she's now in your memory, too.

You may forget about Soledad as soon as you finish reading this.
Or, perhaps, I may make her a bit more memorable
or bring her name again later, so if you forget her now,
you will remember when you see her name later on.

Soledad was 82 years old when she died.
The house, high in the mountains, had no electricity,
and each morning, she would milk cows and look around for snakes.

Snakes loved the sun and would come out to lie on the stones.
Some of the snakes were poisonous, but they only bite if frightened.

Nobody knows how Soledad appeared and from where she came.
She was always living with Rafael's family, although she was not related to any of them.

Soledad never married.
Every night she would make bread in the oven,
enough for the whole family.
She would drink coffee all day long,
and her hands smelled of coffee, bread, and milk.

When we moved to our house in Florida, Rafael bought a machete to protect against the snakes.
He never used it, and the machete was lost,
just as so many things tend to get lost and never found again.

(Where do all these lost things go?)

 

(2)

Before coming to the Mayo Clinic, I was preparing to perform my 'Arctica' with the Oslo Philharmonic.
In my hotel room in Rochester, I had a piano, and after long days of tests and doctor's consultations,
I would return and practice for the upcoming concert.

Very few people knew I was at the Mayo Clinic. One of them was Enric Sala.
Enric is an explorer with National Geographic and my partner in the "Arctica" project.
Enric encouraged me to put my health first and not to postpone the surgery.
I don't know if I would have the strength to cancel my performance in Oslo without Enric's support and perspective.

Fortunately, the presenters found another pianist who was able to learn the solo part in time.
The performance in Oslo went on as scheduled.
I felt like the captain who abandoned the ship, yet the ship miraculously sailed on,
while the captain was left alone on the reefs, bruised and confused.

Each day in the hospital, some part of me was in Oslo, rehearsing with the choir,
rehearsing with the orchestra, practicing alone.
Another part of me was back in the Arctic, listening to its silence (which is never silent)
and trying to grasp the enormity of its solitude.

Arctica – the fragile giant, the North of the North.

Only a small part of me, the least real one, was in the hospital,
trying to walk around my room (ten steps in each direction)
while holding onto the IV stand.

I also used the IV stand in my symphony as a musical instrument –
it is how "Arctica" starts – with the sound of drops falling from an IV stand.
Sound of time passing, ice melting, seconds and droplets melting away.

(Sound of a hospital, of a medical emergency, of life passing or life renewing itself.)

 

(3.)

Generally speaking, quarantines need to be continuous –
since at any time in any given place, there are plenty of contagious illnesses.
One quarantine should melt into another.

Quarantines shouldn't be limited to viruses.
For example, when there is a spike in fatal crashes while driving,
there should be a few days per week when driving is forbidden.
Or at least limited to certain hours.
Let's say one would be allowed to drive between 2:00 and 5:00 AM at night
when nobody drives, but not during rush hours.
It would certainly balance things and improve statistics.

The researchers at the Mayo Clinic explained to me that Cushing disease
has only a 30% success rate of treatment by operation in Germany,
while in the USA, the rate of success is 100%.

"How could it be?" I asked.

"We operate on healthy people," the researcher explained. "In Germany, they wait
until you are damaged by the illness. Healthy people have a 100% recovery rate."

Statistics are a powerful thing.

For example, if there is a spike in divorces, let's freeze all marriages for a while.
Fewer marriages result in fewer divorces.

It's not a bad idea to quarantine all children; they seem to get ill much more often.
Healthy children equal healthy nations.

And definitely forbid people from gathering.

(Let's approach life in a way to improve statistics.)

 

(4.)

Why would anyone want to gather anyway? I never understood that.
Much better to stay at home and read good books.

Or you can listen to orchestral music using noise-cancelling earphones.
Noise cancellation is vital because this is how audible viruses (for example, news) get in.
The earphones don't fully protect you from noise, so when you are not listening to symphonic music,
you should wear earplugs with noise-cancelling earphones on top of the earplugs.

If someone asks you a question, just nod in response.
Nobody expects you to listen anyway.
Nodding is similar to clicking likes under social media posts –
you just add your support to the ego-boosting activities of your friends.
Nobody expects you to actually read their posts or click on their links (unless they contain cute animals, of course.)
After all, if you start reading and clicking on all posts of all your friends, most of whom you have never met,
you will never live to be 82 like Soledad, who lived alone in the mountain and never owned a computer.

The other positive side of a continuous quarantine
is that the Apocalypse loses its edge after a while.
One can scream, "We are all doomed!" only until one loses one's voice.
After a while, it's no longer believable.

But I'm worried about my parents. They are 82 like Soledad.
They don't fully understand the weight of the impending disaster, even though they have a computer and television and other viral spreading news outlets. They still venture outside and are reckless enough to visit various doctors wherein the waiting rooms they wait for sick people to spread more germs around.

Their refusal to quarantine themselves saddens me.

I have quarantined myself from everyone long ago, for that's what a writer must do anyway.

(It comes with the territory.)

 

(5.)

Can poetry and music, serious music, still be written?
In times when people have forgotten how to listen,
how to keep silent, how to remain still?

Perhaps I am starting to sound depressive.
As my doctors have warned me, cortisol deficiency can take its toll.

Every week, I receive a questionnaire from the Mayo Clinic.
The questionnaire is always the same.
It compares my attitude and feelings before and after the surgery.

I don't think my answers have changed so far, but I do not know for sure
since I did not keep my previous answers.
Probably, researchers may find my data disappointing.
They would like to see a graph. A graph is when lines go up and down.
Flat graphs are boring. Flat graphs are unremarkable.
Like rubber ducklings in a bathtub of a polar bear hunter.

Keep it together, I say to myself.
But I am worried that I may not be able to keep it all together
and may turn into a soundwave or break into tiny particles
that no longer make any sense and can't be reconstructed.

(I wish I could go to that mountain and meet Soledad,
who never, I am sure, worried about becoming a soundwave.)

 

 

From My Diary – February 2020 [by Lera Auerbach]

Suite del Ocells © Lera Auerbach

(1)

At first, the days were numbered.
They were numbered before the surgery and then after.

Going under is a bit like dying, but you know you will wake
and that you are not entirely alone in this.
You welcome the temporary oblivion that anesthesiology provides.

What if we knew for certain that reincarnation is real?
Would it change our fear of dying?

The days after surgery are marked by progress,
life stripped to its essentials.

The body learns how to function again, how to adapt,
and you are just grateful for any sleep you can get.

You long for things to return to normal, or at least their appearance,
even though you suspect that the new normal and the old may never be reconciled.

The news from Europe and Asia is full of numbers and statistics:
the new virus ravaging through China has made its way to Europe.

I don't turn on the TV in my hospital room.
Instead, I open the All Good Things book on my Kindle.

I enlarge each painting or drawing and drown in each image, appreciating its beauty.
The book is a personal anthology created by Stephen Ellcock –
one of the very few people I follow on social media.

(Every day Stephen posts images that speak volumes;
images that reassure me that not everything is dismal and there is beauty
hidden in the open, just waiting for someone to give it form.)

(2)

Today is the 24th of February 2020.

As I write this, I feel the longing for the present moment – this moment in time.

Last week, I was in the hospital at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.
It was snowing, and February felt as cold as the Februaries of my childhood in Chelyabinsk.

I remember waking up in intensive care after the surgery.
The pain was overwhelming.
If I have to endure this pain all my life, I would rather die, I thought.

There were two men in intensive care in hospital beds like me
and some shadowy nurses. I couldn't see them clearly:
everything doubled in my eyes and made me feel nauseous.

One of the men was moaning.
The other was interrogated by doctors or nurses
who kept on asking him if he had ever had a heart attack.
They just kept on repeating the same questions,
but the man didn't seem to understand them.

Or did I dream this up?

When I woke up, nobody was next to me.
For a moment, I thought I had already died and this combination
of pain, nausea, loneliness, and moaning was hell or purgatory,
or whatever is waiting for us in the forever beyond.

I drifted in and out.

Then there was a nurse next to me.
She kept on repeating the same question over and over again,
"Can you rate the level of your pain on the scale from one to ten?"

At first, I could not understand what she was saying.
How can you measure pain? The enormity of it.
And how would such a scale look?

How would one take all this shapeless pain and put it on a scale?
Wouldn't the pain spill and fill the entire room, overflowing?
I was drowning in pain, and I was asked to measure it?
How do you rate your drowning experience?
Unbearable?
Almost unbearable?
Almost bearable?
When everything doubles in your eyes – does it mean that your pain doubles too?

I found it difficult to speak or to find my tongue.
The nurse put something soothing on my lips.

"How do you rate your pain on the scale between one and ten?" she asked again.
She didn't seem to be annoyed by my silence.

"It is ten," I managed to whisper.
Then I thought again. I was able to withstand it somehow.
It means it could have been worse.

"Maybe nine," I corrected myself.

"I'll give you more painkillers," said the nurse,
and a sickening wave of nausea took me into its current.

"All is doubled," I managed to say;
and heard before being carried into oblivion:

"She has a very low pulse…"

"Still high pain…"

"Too long…"

(Too long...)

(3)

Before the surgery, they strip me naked.
Completely naked. Underwear and all.

I put on a robe that has an opening in the back.
The robe doesn't close well.
I feel like a baby just born into the world, completely defenceless.

There are many people.
They come and introduce themselves:
surgical team, anesthesiologists, nurses.

Each person asks my name and date of birth,
what surgery I am having, and on which side.
They know it, but it's the protocol –
I'm told it's for my own safety.

After continually repeating my name and date of birth
for each new face entering the room, I start to feel strangely removed from myself
as if I'm saying the name of someone else, not my own.

Indeed, this particular combination of letters and syllables feels almost random.
I'm me, but not my name.
But if I'm not my name, then who am I?

I think about it while I lay naked,
waiting for the nurses to roll me into the surgery room.
They roll my bed through corridors so fast I get dizzy and cold.

In the operating room, I notice that I'm the only one not wearing a mask.
I remember: they will put some kind of a breathing apparatus
into my nose and throat after I fall asleep.

They will also put a catheter, make four openings in my ribs
for the instruments and the camera.
And I will not feel or remember any of it.

One of the surgical assistants lifts my robe and, with a marker,
writes something on my belly on the right side,
just around the place they will cut.

Later, I discover next to the angry-looking scars,
two large black letters, TM.
Why TM?
For some reason, I remember this abbreviation from some time ago
when I was learning transcendental meditation.
But transcendental meditation has nothing to do with it,
although perhaps it is also some sort of anesthesiology.

TM stands for Trevor McKenzie, the name of the surgeon.
The letters, written in a sharpie, remain next to the scars for weeks after the surgery.
I feel tattooed or branded, but it doesn't upset me, I find it rather amusing.

Everything is so strange – it must be happening to someone else.
Not me, but to the person whose name and date of birth
I recite mechanically to everyone who enters my hospital room.

The initials of the surgeon's name on my belly feel more like a sculptor’s signature.
Let your initials signify your responsibility, welcoming my future without the tumor.

(I shall be your greatest masterpiece, my surgeon.)

(4)

The time in intensive care with shadowy nurses and moans feels endless –
dark void, unbearable, unending.

The next time I wake up, I'm in the hospital room,
I can see the snow falling through the dark windows,
it's late evening.

Where did this day go?
We came to the hospital early in the morning.

Rafael is in the room.
My lips are so swollen I can't talk.
My lips are blocking my voice.

"All shall be well," repeats Rafael.

I feel empty and light-headed,
so I let my mind fill with this thought.

All shall be… shall… Why shell?
Does it mean all is not well now but will be well in the future?
Does it mean that this thought is a shell?
And if it is a shell, what is the real thought within its protective embrace?

But I'm too tired to open the shell.

(I drift into sleep again.)

(5)

Today is exactly two weeks since my surgery.
Two weeks felt like two months. Or two years.
But not entirely in a bad way.

My previous life feels distant, not quite real.
Yet my life now is even less real in its normalcy, in its un-remarkableness.

The bloody mess is all around, yet nowhere to be seen.
IKEA's designs are maddening.

There are 80 cases of coronavirus in New York now.

(People have stopped consuming Corona beers out of superstition.)

(6)

The scars on my belly do not have stitches or threads, only glue.
The glue is still there after two weeks.
In one of the four scars, it's starting to peel off.

"In a year or so none will be visible," Rafael assures me,
probably concerned over me being concerned over my scarred appearance.

I'm not concerned. The scars make the surgery real.
Without them, it all seems to be a dream within a dream.

Maybe some part of me is forever stuck in the purgatory of Intensive Care,
trying to measure the unmeasurable and weigh the unthinkable,
while someone in monotone keeps on asking about a failed heart?

Can someone attack your heart?
Can your heart attack someone?
Can your heart be broken?

(Even the smallest feather could tip the point.)

(7)

I was ill, I had surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester,
and I had to cancel my upcoming concerts.

Finally, I returned home to pick up my life but found that in the meantime,
the world, too, had fallen ill.

Unlike me, the world is steadily getting worse and not on the mend at all.
People went mad with fear of catching a deadly virus,
and panic is spreading across the borders.

Rafael bought 25 dry army breakfasts that are supposed to last for 25 years.
Then he bought 25 dry army dinners and a massive bottle of water.

"We should probably buy more cat food," he said.

(After all, Aya, our cat, may not want dry army breakfasts for years to come.)

(8)

I wish to make the world around me understandable,
but everything around me, every object, contains something
that refuses to be defined.

I write in order to understand, not vice versa.
But understanding, if any, is fleeting and cunning –
a red fox-demon, a clock with cut-off hands of time.

(I stand empty-handed.)

 

 

 

From the archive: The Black Swan [by David Lehman]

<<<
I write in self-imposed isolation. The Corona virus that originated in Wuhan, China, and is spreading with the speed of a medieval plague, has mandated “social distancing,” a phrase now commonplace. In Wall Street lingo, we have suffered a fearful “black swan event” that no economic model could have forecast. The shock to our systems of living and of thought has not yet been fully absorbed, but already the stock market has tumbled, main streets look like ghost streets, schools are closed, colleges have sent their students home, the NBA has shut down, “March madness” was canceled, and spring training, too. Even politicians have taken notice. Emergency measures are taking effect. The effort to create an effective vaccine is under way. We can hope that an antidote is in a chemist’s test tube even now. Medical scientists are doing their best to “flatten the infection curve” – to limit the spread of this ultra-contagious virus that has already killed many thousands of people and caused whole nations to close down.

Confined to quarters, I have the luxury of thinking about this plague in relation to those in our literature and history – the ten plagues god visited upon the Egyptians in Exodus; the plague Oedipus brought on Thebes when he committed the twin sins of parricide and incest; the bubonic plague that decimated Europe in the fourteenth century. It is possible to regard the current situation allegorically as a punishment we have brought upon ourselves or possibly as a prophecy of geopolitical warfare or a radical solution to the problem Malthus posed. Whatever else it is, the disaster is also a failure of the imagination inasmuch as we were as unprepared for it as we were at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The reassuring thing is that we did win the war that we entered on that day.

In the aftermath of the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” gained a new currency. The most famous line of that poem – “We must love one another or die” – was brutalized in an opinion piece in today’s New York Times (March 19, 2019), which substituted “help” (and “assist”) for “love.” The more important point is that Auden’s poetry endures. Poetry matters. American poets will be living through a crisis worse than any in my lifetime, and how they respond to it will prove a fascinating test and challenge.>>

from the archive; first posted March 20, 2000

<<<
I write in self-imposed isolation. The Corona virus that originated in Wuhan, China, and is spreading with the speed of a medieval plague, has mandated “social distancing,” a phrase now commonplace. In Wall Street lingo, we have suffered a fearful “black swan event” that no economic model could have forecast. The shock to our systems of living and of thought has not yet been fully absorbed, but already the stock market has tumbled, main streets look like ghost streets, schools are closed, colleges have sent their students home, the NBA has shut down, “March madness” was canceled, and spring training, too. Even politicians have taken notice. Emergency measures are taking effect. The effort to create an effective vaccine is under way. We can hope that an antidote is in a chemist’s test tube even now. Medical scientists are doing their best to “flatten the infection curve” – to limit the spread of this ultra-contagious virus that has already killed many thousands of people and caused whole nations to close down.

Confined to quarters, I have the luxury of thinking about this plague in relation to those in our literature and history – the ten plagues god visited upon the Egyptians in Exodus; the plague Oedipus brought on Thebes when he committed the twin sins of parricide and incest; the bubonic plague that decimated Europe in the fourteenth century. It is possible to regard the current situation allegorically as a punishment we have brought upon ourselves or possibly as a prophecy of geopolitical warfare or a radical solution to the problem Malthus posed. Whatever else it is, the disaster is also a failure of the imagination inasmuch as we were as unprepared for it as we were at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The reassuring thing is that we did win the war that we entered on that day.

In the aftermath of the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” gained a new currency. The most famous line of that poem – “We must love one another or die” – was brutalized in an opinion piece in today’s New York Times (March 19, 2019), which substituted “help” (and “assist”) for “love.” The more important point is that Auden’s poetry endures. Poetry matters. American poets will be living through a crisis worse than any in my lifetime, and how they respond to it will prove a fascinating test and challenge.>>

from the archive; first posted March 20, 2000

Resonating at Random [by Lera Auerbach]

 

Ink on Paper by Lera Auerbach

 

A tree is never just a tree. 

Social distancing one could measure. But how distant should one be from oneself? 

Too distant, and you risk losing yourself and becoming numb, incapable of true empathy and love. 

Too close, and you fall apart, unable to hold on to the imaginary thread
that keeps different parts of you together.

A book is like a tree: it needs a chance to grow, to take hold,
to find enough nourishment in the soil, enough water. 

In its early stages, it's too fragile, while the hurricane season is just around the corner,
and strong winds could uproot and demolish it. 

Where do all the unwritten books go? Half-written? Completed manuscripts waiting for editors? 

Forgotten manuscripts waiting for readers? Forgotten lives? 

Like a child, a book requires sacrifice. It hurts you, its birth can be bloody painful.

It can also give you the greatest joy. Ultimately, it is never yours. 

It is born through you but doesn't belong to you; you are simply its tool
and a highly imperfect one at that. 

To read a book the way one asks for forgiveness, 
as an act of searching for solace. 

But a book is just a book – a collection of words, 

resonating at random 

only when struck.

 

"Flatten the Curve": a plague poem [by Hilton Obenzinger]

How heroic are the grocery clerks
And the fast-food fry cooks
How brave are the ordinary workers
And the priests wandering through empty churches
How courageous are UPS drivers who risk their lives
How stoic are the cashiers and the bus drivers
And there’s no way to thank them all
All will be well once we unbend the horizon
I weep when I see a happy baby
Blissful and unaware that the Angel of Death
Is trying to erase the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel
How tender are the smiles of life
How wonderful the professional calm of nurses
How sublime the persistence of doctors
How moving the faces of anxious waiting
How close we are in our distance
I want to use big words for such big feelings
But the words keep getting smaller and smaller
Flatten the curve and rise up

March 22, 2020

A Dispatch from “Journal of the Plague Year”: The Black Swan [by David Lehman]

I write in self-imposed isolation. The Corona virus that originated in Wuhan, China, and is spreading with the speed of a medieval plague, has mandated “social distancing,” a phrase now commonplace. In Wall Street lingo, we have suffered a fearful “black swan event” that no economic model could have forecast. The shock to our systems of living and of thought has not yet been fully absorbed, but already the stock market has tumbled, main streets look like ghost streets, schools are closed, colleges have sent their students home, the NBA has shut down, “March madness” was canceled, and spring training, too. Even politicians have taken notice. Emergency measures are taking effect. The effort to create an effective vaccine is under way. We can hope that an antidote is in a chemist’s test tube even now. Medical scientists are doing their best to “flatten the infection curve” – to limit the spread of this ultra-contagious virus that has already killed many thousands of people and caused whole nations to close down.

Confined to quarters, I have the luxury of thinking about this plague in relation to those in our literature and history – the ten plagues god visited upon the Egyptians in Exodus; the plague Oedipus brought on Thebes when he committed the twin sins of parricide and incest; the bubonic plague that decimated Europe in the fourteenth century. It is possible to regard the current situation allegorically as a punishment we have brought upon ourselves or possibly as a prophecy of geopolitical warfare or a radical solution to the problem Malthus posed. Whatever else it is, the disaster is also a failure of the imagination inasmuch as we were as unprepared for it as we were at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The reassuring thing is that we did win the war that we entered on that day.

In the aftermath of the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” gained a new currency. The most famous line of that poem – “We must love one another or die” – was brutalized in an opinion piece in today’s New York Times (March 19, 2019), which substituted “help” (and “assist”) for “love.” The more important point is that Auden’s poetry endures. Poetry matters. American poets will be living through a crisis worse than any in my lifetime, and how they respond to it will prove a fascinating test and challenge.

The Corona Virus holds a press conference (by Mitch Sisskind)

 

Virus: Good morning. I'll be glad to take a few questions.

Reporter #1: What are you actually trying to accomplish?

Virus: Well, there's a moment in The Possessed, the novel 
by Fyodor M. Dostoevsky, when the main character --
I believe his name was Strombolini  -- says that since
he's already made a mess of his life, he'll try to make as 
big a mess of it as possible. In other words, he'll
transform destruction, or perhaps entropy is a 
better word, into creation by making it intentional. 
It's a bit like something Kenneth Koch used to say
about writing poetry: if something isn't working,
do it more.

Reporter #2: So you're an intellectual. Have you read
Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor?:  

Virus: Certainly not. But I've infected the University
of Chicago. Did you know that Leo Strauss, the
phlebotomist who for twenty years was the Robert
Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor
of political science at the University of Chicago, in private
conversations used to worry about the schvartzes 
coming across Jackson Park? Well. he did.

Reporter #2: Don't you mean phenomenologist
rather than phlebotomist?

Virus: Thank you. But rather than either phlebotomist
or phenomenologist, I meant to say podiatrist. What 
used to be called a foot doctor.

Reporter #3: Could you please be serious for 
a moment?

Virus: I'll be serious if you'll be roebuck. It
was a wonderful store at one time. People
used to be able to order a whole house 
which would arrive disassembled in a 
railroad car, and then they'd put it 
together themselves. There were 
31,000 parts. That was going on
even at the time of the 1918 epidemic. 
There simply aren't people like that
today, as Nestor says in Homer's Iliad,
as translated by W.H.D. Rouse.

Reporter #4: Can you please stop your
infernal bookishness?

Virus: All right.

Reporter #4: What do you think of Donald Trump?

Virus: (sighs) I knew someone would ask that.
Listen, Trump is neither the hero nor the 
villain of this story. What's important is not
Trump himself, but the response to Trump 
in you and you and you and you. In this
sense, Trump is like the biblical Pharaoh.
Some people hurried to leave Egypt
when Pharaoh allowed it, and some 
people actually wanted to stay. Lindsey 
Graham would be somebody like that. 
Speaking of which, has it occurred to 
anyone that the name "Lindsey Graham"
naturally suggests "Lindsey Graham Cracker,"
because Lindsey Graham would have been
a segregationist in the old days, and 
"cracker" means a bigoted white person?
You see, the universe is always sending 
coded messages like that, but you people 
need to be aware of them and understand
them. Ahem. I myself am such a message. 

Reporter #4: Oh, for Christ's sake!

Virus: Well, I'm getting a bit weary. But 
before I go, I'd like to ask you a question.
Do you think I will be Time magazine's 
Person of the Year?

Reporter #5: No, because you're not a person.

Virus: (sighs) True -- and that's my tragedy.
I'm a bit like Satan in Paradise Lost, by 
John Milton.

Reporter #6: Oh, for Christ's sake!

Virus: Yes indeed. "Those who have ears,
let them hear."

Plague Poem #2: ["The Plague" by David Lehman]

The Plague

Albert Camus wrote The Plague,
which I want to re-read this week
(now that the frogs, the lice,
and the locusts are upon us)
because his hypothesis is
that the bubonic plague
has broken out in Algeria,
in the coastal town of Oran,
in the 1940s. The plague
he has in mind is bubonic,
the Black Death of the fourteenth century,
which killed a third of Europe.
Fleas from infected rodents transmitted it.

In The Plague the bureaucrats muddy things,
it's a false alarm, says one, and let's not call it
a plague but an unusual type of fever.
Lots of plagues in history, yet each comes as a surprise.
The will -- the competitive desire to live
while others are dying -- is most intense in a calamity.
Nine months from now more babies will be born.

3 / 15 / 20

Plague Poem #1 [by Hilton Obenzinger]

Our Social Distance

Stay away and be my love
We’re so close together when we’re so far apart
I take solitary walks with multitudes
I talk to myself but mostly I hear your voice
We follow each other at a distance
Songs ring down empty dark Italian streets
Windows of all the apartments fill with harmonies
Woody Guthrie is already singing the Rambling Virus Blues
Bach has written a new version of the Corona Variations
I can hear music winding through all the avenues
But there’s no guitar and no piano in sight
We’re all alone with each other
Keep your distance and make happy sex
Dance with each other in different continents
Everyone can be magnanimous and fart
And what our neighbors don’t know won’t hurt them
Let me be kind to you by way of Internet
Swimming through our brains
All alone we can open our doors
Yet keep far away from each other
As far as any of us can spit
So keep your distance and be close
Speak splendid poems and deeper wit
Stay away and be my love

Hilton Obenzinger
March 13, 2020