Spring arrives, then summer
during the season of no. No proms
or graduation parties, no Mother’s Day
 
or Father’s Day dinners. No browsing
new books or sales racks, no art or art
supplies, or seeing what produce is fresh,
 
in season. No popping in or coffee dates
to catch up on news. Weddings postponed,
couples live together in quarantine,
 
voice irritations and endearments. Season
of baking bread and cookies, season of no
limit to how much you can sleep.
 
Limits on how much butter, meat,
and toilet paper you can buy.
Insomnia and no limit to what
 
you can worry about. No justice
for people of color, for the poor
murdered by police, recorded on three
 
cameras. No bottom for a so-
called president’s rhetoric inciting
hate crimes. No shortage of tear gas.
 
No halt to the worldwide spread of a novel
virus whose only job is to replicate.
Not enough testing. No proper
 
funerals or memorial services. No
saying goodbye or holding hands.
No travel or summer camp. No
 
treatment, no vaccine. Prevention
measures ignored and mocked
by those who want haircuts,
 
manicures, massages. Maybe
the planet is telling us, No. Humans
are no longer welcome here.

Perhaps the climb up Old Rag, not far from me,
or past the gate to Mr. Nuckols’s property to see
this year’s calves before the males are hauled off
to slaughter. I could walk the Camino de Santiago
at my own pace, nodding to others on the way
 
or climb Kilimanjaro. How about a ticket to Mars,
one-way? I’d like to see Down House, take a loop
on his Sandwalk, most doable with my bad leg.
The Galapagos calls, though travel is too arduous,
exhausts me from where I sit in my window seat.
 
An interior pilgrimage might suffice, a trek to remote
corners where memories are still preserved: scent
of chlorine in my Florida pool, its cool blue morning,
cooing mourning doves perched on wires. I can
back up to my childhood bedroom with my sister
 
so near I can pat her arm. My parents’ voices beyond
the thin wall. A pilgrimage to Brooklyn, my friends
across the street, I walk again to Shellbank Junior
High School with Maureen, Linda, and Mally. We
wait for Gavrielle, innocent of what’s ahead.