Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America's Poets Respond to the Pandemic

by Alice Quinn

Facetime My wife and I sit out on the sundeck with our coffee every morning. Do you want to grill tonight, she asks, or should I make something? And if she cooked something last night I’ll say, you cooked something last night so why don’t I grill? And if I grilled last night I’ll say, I grilled last night, so why don’t you cook something? And this conversation makes sense and is reassuring. Meanwhile a coyote trotted down our boring little suburban street yesterday, right here in Cleveland Heights like he owned the place. And I read that monkeys are ransacking shops in India, and jackals are wandering the streets of Tel Aviv, and water buffalo are just kind of standing around on the empty highways of New Delhi, while in the closed-down Tokyo Aquarium these tiny eels—garden eels, they’re called— are forgetting what we look like. The aquarium keepers are worried that the eels are getting lonely, so they’ve hung iPads on the tanks. They ask on their website, “Could you please show your face to the eels from your home?” And of course everyone is phoning the eels which makes sense and is reassuring. The sky is so blue the starlings can’t bear to come down. The seas are so quiet that the whales, for once, can hear their songs of sorrow and desire. And as I stand in my driveway tonight, grilling, I feel grateful to the eels. How nice of them to miss us, after all we’ve done. Such magnanimity in a beast so small. I decide to give them a call.

emptying your fears of time past,

And, in the absence of people living in ignorant, dangerous, and heartless ways, the earth began to heal. — And when the danger passed, and the people joined together again, they grieved their losses, and made new choices, and dreamed new images, and created new ways to live and heal the earth fully, as they had been healed.

CLAUDIA RANKINE Weather On a scrap of paper in the archive is written I have forgotten my umbrella. Turns out in a pandemic everyone, not just the philosopher, is without. We scramble in the drought of information held back by inside traders. Drop by drop. Face covering? No, yes. Social distancing? Six feet under for underlying conditions. Black. Just us and the blues kneeling on a neck with the full weight of a man in blue. Eight minutes and forty-six seconds. In extremis, I can’t breathe gives way to asphyxiation, to giving up this world, and then mama, called to, a call to protest, fire, glass, say their names, say their names, white silence equals violence, the violence of again, a militarized police

force teargassing, bullets ricochet, and civil unrest taking it, burning it down. Whatever contracts keep us social compel us now to disorder the disorder. Peace. We’re out to repair the future. There’s an umbrella by the door, not for yesterday but for the weather that’s here. I say weather but I mean a form of governing that deals out death and names it living. I say weather but I mean a November that won’t be held off. This time nothing, no one forgotten. We are here for the storm that’s storming because what’s taken matters.

Lucretius Thus you will learn these things, and with little effort on your part. One thing will clarify another, and dark night will not rob you of your way, and the sun will not blind you, or the river drown you, until you see deeply into the final rule of nature. So things will illuminate other things.