Pestilence

1

It began with a continent on fire.

Any way you turned the globe,the flames bent with the wrist,the animals — God, the animals — in treetops, singed.

The omens were there; we’d erred,but the charge was mostly metaphorical.

We were not the animals.

In those moments, the mind resists knowingwith any precision how others lived,or else, it is a tax paid disbelievingly.The fire seen widening from outer spaceand nothing to lessen the undoing.

Life was objectionable, still the mindto greet it like a river winding into blindness.

The Chinese Year of the Rat and this,its opening act.

2

Like Lady Macbeth, I proceededfrom one bad dream to the next,

held loose the reins of life,horse bent by a river of tears.

What a way to fall out with daylight,blinded by the actual,

the unimaginable repeatedly imagined.Life was contagion; everything was life.

3

On those days it hurt to be in the world,the only thing to be done was to pay attention.

A shock of white blossoms like antique laceappearing in the window overnight.

Times were extraordinary,yes, everyone could see that.

Conditions were warlike;even the doctors were frightened.

When you factored in death by suffocation . . .

Everyone was monitoring the situation.

All the while, nature cheered for itself,the dogwood lit up by its own color.

Not irony, but pardon, I reminded myself.Not irony, but spring.

4

On the second day of spring, the families emergedas though the times had never threatened them.

They were showing their children, yes, here’s gladness still,and look, how legible the little book of life.

The trees have rushed their flowers; it is a season of emergency.

Some compulsions, of course, had been preexisting.The one for naming, for instance: crab apple, redbud,

magnolia. Someone had planted purple tulips,had imagined the future, and here it was, arterial at dusk.

New flowers, new version of familiar long hours.

One afternoon, it hailed, great frozen handfulson the Callery, blossoms flushed with snow.

I took two baths and spent the daylight reading,the hours fleeing and formless. Pleasure,

the body insists, though the mind resists that reading.

5

In dreams, I was illand woke unsure that I was well.

What did “well” even look likethose days that I had been it —

well? I had been the sort of person . . .

I had been the sortto look forward all day to the day.

In the mirror, I lifted my shirt,the flesh growing lax beneath.

Through the window,watched the occasional pedestrian

now a soldierserving this city of panic.

6

Friends fed the day hopelike a broken fever,

articles on dolphinsin Venetian canals.

By then, the hospitalshad flowered white tents,

bodies transferredfrom windows

to the makeshiftmorgues below.

To picture the coolersmade the soul detach

and ask to be shippedto a nearby planet.

I was afraid and knewhow to be afraid,

scrubbing everything that camein contact with the body.

Some joked there’d bea generation born from this.

Who could treat the bodyas anything but risk?

7

A mouthful of black tea confirming taste.Scent of bleach rubbed gently on the mail.

Something is meant to be improvingbut something has mislaid the nights, the days.

On wet pavement, the robins reflectwhole robins made shimmering cement.

We who kept man and nature separate,did we expect no hidden charge,

or was it knowing our debtthat slowed belief?

Is this the carnival to whichwe’d always planned on arriving?

The trees looked mostly alike all yearexcept on the weeks you saw their flowers.

Parachutes of pollen in the sun,as though the earth had every

intention to hold on.

8

In April, I walked in the middle of the streettesting an appetite for life againstan appetite for peace.

I searched all eyes for similar crisis;come evening, clapped for what had spared us,a pantomime of happiness withstood under duress.

It was death...