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.