Let's Hear It for the Chorus
Dear plague doctor,
I’ve stopped checking the daily numbers because no matter what they are, we remain here in the epicenter of mass death. Some days ago, the difference between this place and others became solid. Air into gelatin. Friends in other parts of the country report that “it’s coming,” that people are finally taking their fragility more seriously. In New York, no one can pretend it’s not here. We’re in it, with the desperate hope it’s not in us.
Whether or not the virus is physically inside any one of us, though, it is in us nonetheless—and likely it’s not going anywhere. It’s become harder and harder to imagine the other side of it. For the first few weeks inside, I pictured a future in which I would be running toward my friends with joy, sloppy ecstatic embraces after months of distance. I wonder now what it will take for me to allow that kind of touch. Everyone I know has become sensitive and wary at the sight of other people. Even just walking the dog, touching nothing but her leash, I return home feeling coated in filth. Every sensation is amplified. Can I really imagine holding and being held by others, the way I once did? When my body is no longer the body it was?
In the beginning I panicked, then I mourned the impending losses. Now I fear what will be lost even when we come back together.
I came across these mayapple sprouts that looked like a village in a Bosch painting and I saw you in them. There in the center: you and your apprentice making your way through the woods. Traveling healers.
As a plague weatherer Of Old, you must find my generation tiresome—we’ve got the video chat, after all. At least we’re not worried about miasma. But social distancing is a thing of the last century or so, unless you lived in a leprosy colony. (Did you?) We don’t know how to do this, and probably neither did you.
But I also fear becoming people who do know how to do this. Who hesitate to hold their friends. Apprehension is nesting deep inside our reflexes, in places we may never be able to reach.
Somewhere in those hardening follicles I wrote a poem. You can have it.
Yours in dramatic masking,
Liz
LET’S HEAR IT FOR THE CHORUS
There is no baby feeling now,
no any-old outstretched arms.
Put the shore and the secret
green cocktails somewhere
they won’t glow.
Down in the plumbing red core
of that gem show the US
rests a moldy scroll called Rebirth.
I say to you, fuck it.
Normal was always a trick lullaby,
as you and the warehouses know.
If you were sick before,
you are now the song the healthy sing
to call mortality back into its cupboard.
I am sorry they never cared about us.
I am sorry in a riverbed way. Dry
and yearning to hold.
An ethicist and a poet walk into a bar
and the poet just goes ahead
and drops dead. She can’t make the case
for her future quality of life.
She does not have an interest.
When the belated nation sings of her it will draw
the angels out of their furious comas.
Unimpressed as ever.
Have you seen my blue-tinged cyclone anywhere—
the sick woman’s urge to live?
There is the word, spite.
There is also the word, soiled.
I walked along the crowning
sprouts of mayapple and said, Here is my ancestor.
Green and medieval they got to work
healing the earth’s warty skin.
I walked along the shrinking violets
and said, you know, My clique.
Weak and fabulous.
Full of demands.
When others ask of us they clamor
for distinctions. “At-risk.” “Underlying.”
The real is in a stew.
We lived with death until death
lived with us. And then we lived some more.