Lake Ontario has gone still, reflecting the city.
\nThe beach is hushed with the open secret.
\nYoung children and dogs see the shapes of the letters
\nOf the signs telling us to keep our distance.
\nLooking south, if the day was clearer,
\nI might see the shadow outline of New York State,
\nAnd hallucinate the wheeze of ventilators
\nIn the swirl of open air that is the border.<\/p>\n
My partner plays balance beam on bleached driftwood
\nWith our seven year-old.
\nShe mirrors his overflowing age,
\nAnd shows him how we come from each other.
\nOur four year-old commands his nana
\nTo stand six feet back;
\nHe holds up a stop-sign hand and grins
\nAs if the world were a traffic game.
\nBut she can’t help herself from reaching for him.
\nThe generations want to collapse into each other.
\nSome of us will never understand
\nHow this is suddenly dangerous.<\/p>\n
My own grandmothers no longer have bodies.
\nEyes closed, I can fall into their talced arms.
\nThey breathe out soft, clipped stories
\nOf the war, rationing, polio, standing on the road
\nTo sell sandwiches to truck drivers.
\nHanging out laundry in the attic.
\nOf a baby born premature and kept warm
\nIn a cooling bread oven,
\nAnd making Sunday dinners for twelve on a single dollar.
\nAs a child I saw their eyes gleam and took it for devotion,
\nBut missed the spark of holding me to account:
\n“How will you make good on all of this?”
\nI missed the winces of pain as they shifted
\nFrom hip to hip in the twilight armchairs.
\nNeither had a place to name their feelings,
\nNor, perhaps, anyone to hear them.
\nI’m ashamed for the time I spent mistaking
\nSilence and class dignity for avoidance.<\/p>\n
What were all those books for? The wandering?
\nWhy am I only learning to garden now?
\nWhy did anyone give us credit cards?
\nWhy did I always find something to do
\nTo keep me hovering above this moment of water?
\nHow did it happen that I was distracted so often
\nFrom the most fragile, vanishing things?
\nWhy did I pry these minutes apart from each other
\nAs if my life resided between them,
\nGazing at imaginary problems,
\nAs if these grains weren’t the continuity I sought?<\/p>\n
None of the scriptures or poems prepared me,
\nOr maybe all of them did.
\nLike the one where the son asks the father
\n“Tell me about the innermost self.”
\nAnd the father says to the son,
\n“Like the salt mingled in ocean water,
\nYou are that, you are that.”
\nToday the son would ask
\n“Tell me what the virus is.”
\nBecause religion left me nothing but kind guesses,
\nI would say: “It’s not quite alive, but it can die.
\nIt doesn’t know chest pain, or the feeling of drowning.
\nIt thrives when it is within us.
\nIt makes us aware of each other.”<\/p>\n
I had a friend who died in his car
\nAfter swallowing a little white pill.
\nHe was a Buddhist who helped and didn’t help people
\nIn relation to how much he marvelled and suffered.
\nHe taught me the phrase, “trouble and joy.”
\nHe’s sitting with me here, closer than six feet,
\nWe talk about impermanence, which he no longer has to test.
\nI murmur “I can’t believe you’re missing this”,
\nMeaning children, a partner, the virus.
\nI hope he ate that pill like those monks
\nWho pretend to eat the last plum on earth.
\nHe was obsessed with the resonance between
\nThe suffering self and the suffering world, and
\nI still can’t tell whether this is perceptive or grandiose.
\nWhite men can be both as we fantasize
\nAbout helping more than we help.
\nBut sitting here now, body and ghost,
\nPerhaps we waste less time.<\/p>\n
The seven year-old comes in for a hug.
\nHe’s too big for my lap. I’ll be getting smaller.
\nMy wife continues balancing practice, for her own joy.
\nThe light changes. It doesn’t matter how.
\nI’m grateful I didn’t bring my phone.
\nSitting back on the kitchen counter,
\nIt fills up with exponentials:
\ninfection rates, grief, financial ruin, platitudes.
\nIf I had brought it, I may have thrown it,
\nTo skip on the glassy water like a mute black stone.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u2014 mr<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Lake Ontario has gone still, reflecting the city. The beach is hushed with the open secret. Young children and dogs see the shapes of the letters [\u2026]<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9083,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"slim_seo":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,23,112],"tags":[690,691,688,111],"class_list":["post-9078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","category-blog","category-poetry","tag-coronavirus","tag-covid-19","tag-pandemic","tag-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9078"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9078\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}