“The plague full swift goes by”
Like most other people in the world today, I’ve been thinking a lot about the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s been taking me back to the time in the 1980s when I worked as speechwriter for the commissioner of the Department of Health in New York City. At that time, the prevention of AIDS/HIV was the main public health concern in the city, followed closely by tuberculosis.
There were, of course, many other problems, some particular to NYC (window falls by children, for example) and some more common everywhere (dog bites, drug abuse, the diseases associated with poverty, and so on).
The commissioner at the time, Dr. Stephen C. Joseph, was very active across the five boroughs, speaking on public health problems. He strongly believed that public health was a political process, and he spent a good deal of time out of the office, explaining and garnering support for the department’s policies across the city and in Washington.
(One policy was the necessity for widespread testing for infection by HIV, which exactly parallels the discussions over testing─or lack of testing, I should say─that we are hearing today.)
It was a wonderful job for me . . . I felt I was contributing to the most important health issues of the day in the best way that I could, though my words.
Sometimes I wrote up to eight speeches a week, along with op-ed pieces and articles for medical journals signed by the commissioner and other physicians in the department. And whenever the Mayor’s Office needed something for Koch to say or write about public health, I was often tapped to write that, too.
Afterwards I calculated that I wrote roughly four hundred speeches about AIDS/HIV in my five years there.
And yet, the job had its consequences.
When I started, they found desk space for me in a cubicle in the Office of Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs). Every day when I came in to work, I passed full-color posters of chancres, rashes, warts, and all the other lesions that STIs can cause.
I certainly don’t mean to make light of any of this─but in the beginning, writing speeches every day about the effects of AIDS/HIV and tuberculosis, and spending my days among public health workers who spent their days tracing contacts of people who might have been infected with STIs without knowing it . . . all had an impact on me.
Riding on the subway to and from work each morning, I began to imagine the city as a vast sea of infection and all the people I passed as unknowing vectors of disease.
Not a healthy outlook.
I got over it, of course, but I’ve been reminded of that time a lot lately. The same issues that the city faced then─the critical need for testing to stem the spread of HIV despite (at that time) there being no treatment for it─are issues now.
When I began to write poetry seriously, infection as a metaphor was one I came back to time and again, due in large part to my time at the Department of Health.
Today’s blog entry includes two poems about infection. The first one, “Serial Killer,” is based on a story an office mate of mine years ago once told me about a job he had infecting mice in a vaccine development lab. It seemed a particularly gruesome occupation when he told me about it, and it stuck with me until I tried to exorcize it in the poem.
As you think about labs trying madly to develop a vaccine for COVID-19, give some thought to the little creatures who give their lives to the effort.
The second poem, “Influenza,” uses the idea of infection as a metaphor for how we respond to other things in our lives.
As always, please enjoy. And stay healthy!
Serial Killer
So the god swooped down, descending like the night.
─Homer
They weighed next to nothing, their bones
more fragile even than a bird’s
when I reached into the cage and
cupped one in my palm, tenderly.
Tenderly, too, the needle, filled
with what poison, what rare
killing toxin tested on these
small creatures, deftly slipped between
their brittle shoulder blades, the fur
bunched in my thumb and forefinger,
a move I learned the first week, saving
time and wasted motions.
They all died. Before injecting
my day’s subjects, I harvested
stiff tiny corpses from the
night before. Or else collected
those I had to sacrifice with
another kind of shot. How like
a god I was, reaching in and
randomly selecting this for
Vaccine Beta, that for Toxin
Alpha, this for a quiet end
in its sleep, that to be rudely
snatched away from the life it knew.
How they feared me, feared the shadow
of my hand as it moved into
position, nudged the cage door open,
and plunged down with unconcerned
speed to snap up the unlucky
and slip in my fatal point,
forcing them to yield up, squealing,
all of their terrible knowledge.
© Donald Levin, 2002. A version of this poem first appeared in Delirium, November 2002.
Influenza
All language is vehicular and transitive.
─Emerson
The vehicle of
a moving tenor
catches us unaware.
When it first appears
we try our best to
ignore its urging
but when it makes its
presence felt, we take
some certain pleasure
in surrendering
to it. At the end
it makes us feel so
awful we wish we
had never been born
though after, we are
better protected
against its striking
again. People the
vehicle with the
rider of your choice:
love, death, sadness, joy,
or even the flu.
© Donald Levin, 2005
