title after John Ashbery
 
I’ve been a shadow some time now. Could attribute a virus
for lingering in one spot, moldering into the floor. Depression
gave 20 years practice to hover like smoke, to avoid sunlight
 
so it wouldn’t spotlight like a dust mote suspended midair.
Better to blend, noiseless and indistinguishable from the dark.
I wanted that much to disappear, vacate into myself, avoiding
 
mirrors like a person never peering outside a window to check
for rain. Covid locked those habits, threw a deadbolt, sat me
with them on the front porch to blend with shade, watch the door.

˖
 
On the paper’s front page, a pedestrian
strides Grand Avenue, a reverse ghost—
a corporeal body walking within a void
—like the rest of the Whittier Daily News.
Air is detained in black type, caught
 
and hermetically sealed in white space.
Glass wall mirrors a vacant Los Angeles. 
City Hall’s pyramid spire sphinxes me
into a three-part riddle whose questions
I don’t recognize. The atmosphere ebbs.

˖
 
They stopped making front doors like this three generations ago.
Almost square, wide enough to drive a pick-up truck through.
Its brick or scab red paint reminds me of Civil War iron armor;
 
its oaken composure predates tall pines adjacent to this house.
It’s a comfort to see something more substantial than myself.
I eavesdrop for brass tumblers to turn, swallow and breathe in.
 
Movement restricted in state, the paper reads. Travelling allowed
for food and medical care and to get exercise. As if anyone dared
to give their fears a stroll. No wind. Not a sign of squirrels or jays.
 
˖
 
I don’t know why the riddle is a stranger.
If I’m just a hermit, hermetically sealed.
Whether there’s just one sphinx or two,
not facing the mirror to dodge the second,
pass on meeting questions about myself.
 
Covid’s not the only virus that suffocates.
What to do with a mind that’s born sick?
When neighbors, ordered to stay at home,
watch contagion unfold through windows,
distant before distancing became sociable.
 
˖
 
Green and green and green, down winding road and college quad—
Philadelphia Street void of brotherly love, rolling toward Uptown,
Whittier College’s dorms unconversational. Not even the specter
 
of favorite son Richard Nixon is in sight. Never thought to miss
his black-suited gloom when he’d haunt his alma mater, across
the street and a turn toward the quad. Much as I enjoy the birds
 
who now punctuate this noiseless sentence of cement sidewalks
on a street that meanders like a passage from a Faulkner novel,
there’s something about the lack of faces along its solitary green.
 
˖
 
I glance toward the door, see blood
in cracks through my chapped hands,
washed every trip, regardless of what
wasn’t touched. I eye the pedestrian
in the paper, walking, and recognize
 
the figure as myself. Our reflection,
passing the looking-glass, is trapped
between microscope slides, catches
the sick, not the sickness. Conflates
the two, now three, in a mutual face.
 
˖
 
Back inside the house, the safety of desk, laptop. A video posted 
of fingers tracing Bach’s Goldberg aria on a piano. Hands echo
in the instrument’s polished fall board. Yellow drapes. A window.
 
Only the pianist’s hands are visible—measured, exact as phrases
they articulate—enough resonance to assuage the ear, enough
image to assure the mind that isolate is not necessarily alone—
 
a nighttime promise to wake from sleep. I watch and watch the video,
for Bach and not for Bach, the rippling a comfort, 
like finches and sparrows outside, like finches and sparrows, the hushed outside.