Covid, we love you
Who else would tell us to spend days in bed,
loving the things we can do
when no one is watching,
no dates on the calendar, no meetings,
when we are fools together, apart, 
separate machines for living… 
Reading books and napping in different rooms
yet together in all that matters
Getting one’s ass in gear, eventually
Launching sticks up our nostrils
What wicked fun!

Remembering now the joy of sick
The excitement of little steps upward on the comeback trail
Recollecting the practical satisfaction of taking food 
    between one’s teeth and actually chewing,
Swallowing comes soon,
along with energy, movement, mobility 
Simple steps outdoors to see if the moon is still there 
or has migrated to another galaxy,
out of a want for company,
someone to pay attention

Moon, we pray you, 
Remember us in our lean times, 
slipping away even as you grow into fullness 
We will waltz about one another,
Lovers in a dance of restraint, 
for (almost) forever
Remembering always the pulling away,
the gravity, the grave situation
of the final, fatal attraction

Covid, it was never meant to be 
Somebody better will – surely –
come along. 
                        

And Dad? What’s he up to?

Where would summer be if I didn’t pick the berries? 
Why would the flowers bloom
if I didn’t venture out to their domain and stare at them 
each morning? 
(and afternoon, and evening, and…) 

Why play the music?
Why relax and float downstream (apologies to lyricists L and Mc)
or eat breakfast under the centenarian oak deity,
squirrels shedding leaves on the toast? 

Why gape at the last reorientations of the heavens
offered at closing curtain time, including those 
that require you to stand in front of the house 
     in your skimpy shorts and stocking feet,
not giving a damn whether some permanent adolescent 
is driving his loud-lousy bike up and down 
     the carefully reconstructed pavement? 

Did I mention the breezes?
The Monarch-enticing Asclepias tuberosa,
the Foxgloves, the Liriope, the Plumbago,
The Vinca Minor, the Anthony’s Waterer Spirea 
(who was Anthony and why did he water?),
some of whom I am not watering this summer
because they did not survive in their dreamtime abundance 
the advance of the hands-clasping trees
     closing light’s avenue overhead
(the Vinca and the Liriope, they remind me, are still here 
     and, surprise, feeling both dry and crowded)…
or all the other current players in the annual extravaganza
whose names now escape my season-shrinking memory?
How many of my expressions have shared in their title 
that memory-evoking touchstone term above?
Do I repeat myself? Well, then I repeat myself. 

It’s enough to love. It’s enough to have loved. 
I do not say goodbye to summer.
It is always summer. 
I do not say goodbye to summer love.
                        

These storms are no respecters of borders 
The rising ocean is the one and universal ocean
The air we breathe is fumigated by traffic-jammed one-world cities
pumping CO2 into the lungs of a one-sky planet,
as surely as we self-centered apes busy-go about our business 
grid-locking Atlanta—Shanghai—London—Mexico City

We will flee to the Andes, surely
Shelter (coolly) in the Boreal Forest
We will climb the foothills of the Canadian 
Rockies to escape the West Coast fire-belt,
Satan laughing among Douglas Firs, 
and retire to luxury digs on sinking islands 
in warm-weather havens, bringing our regrets
and our credit cards, passports to a make-believe world 

Don’t believe it any more.
Earth can no longer afford us, 
we dealers in dead air, foul water, toxic refuse

Refuseniks we must become,
bury our pasts in heaps of abandoned electronics,
in mines and shafts like un-succored wounds in the earth
Flattened mountain tops in West Virginia 
resembling the idiot servants of plutocrats
who walk about with the tops of their skulls removed:
     empty cavities open to the foul air and acid rain,
the killing eye of old Sol lacking the healing green shade 
of the slaughtered forests 

Lay down your weapons, soldiers of the night, 
and embrace your doom
We bury you in slag heaps, and in Old World cities 
encumbered with pyramidal monuments of discarded trumpery, 
all the smog of China to feed the funeral pyres 
in which your bodies of earth give back to earth that which, 
     in ions and particulates, remains strong and fruitful
providing some fertilizer 
for whatever may come after 

A thing of teeth, good teeth, I hope,
for there will be much
to chew on