Hank Lazer, from Poem Series
Covid19 Sutras
COVID19 SUTRA 4 (excerpts)
(we’re back?)
actuality is not
flat this morning
the voice has not
entered me shadowy
light through pines
to see it steadily
peace & compassion
are these the voice
it itself remains
the question head
heart hand trans
mission is happening
we could think
about it forever
walking upon the bare
ground i look down
transparent eyeball
i have no head
i never did
it all passes
through me i am
a door way a portal
an occasion by which
it arrives
magical catalyst
read this remember
something else mind
in tranquility sees
it as it
arises it is
place that shelters
you know one
place well changing
light seasonal
dance of green & gold
this happens to you
We debate the meaning of the numbers.
Infection count, death count, caught in a time delay.
Death of logic, death of rationality, science becomes
something to believe or not.
Once that verb gets introduced, science finds itself cast
into a space where it perishes.
The future has contracted into now & the next few months.
Pileated woodpecker pounds the railing of the deck.
Whoever told you that observing your mind was easy?
I can’t live like this all the time.
We already are self-driving cars.
Nothing so pleasing as that first bowel movement of the day.
Hydrangeas are beginning to bloom & a few gardenias too.
Time & change: listen to the tune underneath it all.
meaning cannot be
extracted from daily
reality so don’t
expect it in a
poem cascade
of overlapping bird
calls traffic & human
activity mix with
wind through trees
who would seize
on one thing
over another
…..
“We inherited a broken, terrible system,” Trump told reporters on April 18. “Our cupboards were bare. We had very little stockpile.”[1]
Branches of the gardenia bush bow down overflowing with blossoms.
“Trump can lie, but the numbers cannot. Obama left office with an unblemished record of building up the nation’s pandemic preparedness. Trump systematically sought to dismantle it.”[2]
The new sod – centipede – is beginning to take root filling in the bare patches.
“By Obama’s final year, the nation’s preparedness on all measurements was 98% to 100%. That’s by the Trump administration’s own assessment.”[3]
If it’s not possible to sit in the morning, I sit in the afternoon.
“If the cupboard was bare, it’s because Trump swept it clean.”[4]
Typically drawn in the shape of a quickly & expertly drawn not fully closed zero, the enso itself displays a generative emptiness.
“Vaccine or no vaccine, we’re back,” says Trump. (May 15, 2020)
“He was just in a fucking rage. He was saying, ‘This is so unfair to me! Everything was going great. We were cruising to re-election!’”[5]
“American virus deaths at 100,000: What does a number mean?”[6]
“We’re back.” ? My ass, you stupid motherfucker. As if a cloud came over me…
____________________________________
NOTES
[1] St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 25, 2020.
[2] St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 25, 2020.
[3] St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 25, 2020.
[4] St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 25, 2020.
[5] Gabriel Sherman, Vanity Fair, May 26, 2020.
[6] Associated Press headline, May 27, 2020.
Laura Hinton, “Woman of Pompeii—A Day in August 79 A.D.” (Photo taken in modern Pompeii, Italy, August 2019; camera lens located in front of a museum glass house, which holds the plaster-of-Paris body casts whose hollows were created by bodies as they eventually disappeared inside the sealed volcanic ash. So they are not bodies; they mark the absence of bodies.)