There’s a virus coming so my wife
is wiping down the surfaces
with her anxiety.
 
She thinks her friend has the virus.
Jennifer is Patient Zero of Milwaukee,
infecting us with her distracted me-
anderings about self-help
and Chinese medicine.
 
Today, at the store there were no paper
towels or toilet paper.  Things are getting
bad.  I bought some moldy vegetables just so
I could lay down those funky beets
on the table to make my wife laugh.
 
I live a largely self-quarantined life
anyway. I beat myself in a push-
up contest just last week.  I don’t need
an entertainment package because I think
my jokes are so funny.  If I only said what
I was thinking aloud, boy, would I laugh.
 
I drove to work today backwards.
It didn’t matter because everyone
is staying inside trying to flatten
the curve.  I had to write a will
 
but it turned out to be a villanelle
about writing a sonnet about the time
I was picked off first base because
I was looking at a rainbow.
 
I’m not worried about the virus
because I’m addicted to hand sanitizer
and I don’t like shaking hands.
 
Besides, why would you want to shake hands?
You don’t even know me.                        

Are you trying to say you didn’t know bees
are able understand the absence of things
as a quantity, like zero-- like something was
there and isn’t there now? That unlike insects,
ancient civilizations had a hard time grasping
the meaning of nothing? Or that it’s hard for us
even now to sit still, to think of nothing,
and to simply abide?
 
Or that your astigmatism is asymptomatic
making it hard for me to tell if the image
of the point I am trying to make is blurry
to you or simply slowly disappearing?
 
So many questions and so much time, too
much perhaps to contemplate the path from
the bed to the front door to the verboten road
to the vestigial future.
 
In September, a woman will be in her garden
when a cloud passes. She will lift her head,
peer at the sky, and notice the haze crowning the sun. 
 
On this earth there are rhythms no one is listening to;
On this earth there are abandoned vantages;
On this earth there are sleeping rivers waiting.