Covid gives me time to clean out the basement and go through
my sons’ boxes. By December, the death toll in the US will be over
over 300,000. 
 
Boxes of magic markers Johnny used to draw his anime persona
who languidly proclaimed, “I’m a superhero with no powers and no 
motivation.” We need a vaccine for everybody: 7.8 billion human beings.
 
A suitcase unopened since Charles got back from France. 
It’s completely empty. The death toll here is the most 
in the world,  more than the next three countries combined.
 
A teddy bear I haven’t seen in twenty years.  I’d pitch it but my wife 
wants to keep it so she washes him on gentle and then spends most 
of Saturday night blow drying him and fluffing out his pilly fur. 
97,000 children have gotten the virus in the last two weeks of July.
 
There’s even a broadside from one of my poetry readings: 
 
The Quiddity of a Thing
 
In this room, we pretended
this bed was a boat.  We were
in the middle of a storm and I
rocked the mattress almost
tossing you off or I was a bridge
and you would crawl over me 
above the dangers of Snake River.
 
In this room, there is a large bin
of Legos and building blocks.  
We constructed our manors 
and castles before tumbling them down. 
 
In this room, the glow-in-the-dark
stars are falling from the ceiling 
and there is a bed where we lay 
on our backs and gazed 
at the universe above our heads.
 
Poetry doesn’t comfort, it unsettles.
 
While outside, the bats are cutting the dusk 
in half—to the past and the future—
the beat of their wings disappearing in the August sky. 
                        

           Let us not look forward
           nor back. Be cradled, as in
           a swaying boat on the sea.
                                Friedrich Holderlin
 
A moment can feel the same 
as an hour or a day or a year.  
People who are lost in the forest 
end up walking in circles.
 
St. Augustine said time comes
from a non-existent future 
into a present that has
no duration and goes into
a past which has ceased to exist.
 
Tonight, we are the last 
two people on Earth. The past 
is gone now, the future is gone. 
 
Tomorrow, I will wake up 
and you will be gone
but still here.