Nada Gordon, A Photopoem Collage

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NOTE: In the pandemic, time has become a slurry, a fog, a gelatinous mass. One day is not extremely distinguishable from the next except for moods and meals and some small responsibilities and weak attempts at “improvement”– school, tidying, the making of masks and garments, the learning of music and dance. No longer do the ambulances scream by every fifteen minutes, but I remain more or less, something like 100 days on, sheltering in place. Most days, I get sort of fitful by early afternoon and gotta get out of the apartment. The park, two blocks east, is too crowded. Five blocks west is Green-Wood Cemetery, where I’ve gone several times a week since mid-March. I watched the magnolias, the cherry blossoms, and the azaleas bloom and fade. Some rhododendron remains, and now we are onto the roses. Often I go when I am high. I love: walking off the paths, the grass on my legs, the mockingbirds’ incredibly various songs, woodchucks with obstinate expressions on their little faces digging holes beneath the graves, the baby raccoon climbing the tree, the smell of clover, the egret with a tiny silver fish wiggling in its beak before it gulps it down, the torque of magnificent tree barks and the anthropomorphized “private” parts their growth patterns sometimes suggest, the cool “rooms” inside the weeping beeches, the little shredded fabric flower petals I am collecting for some future project to document this time. Also, there is plenty of delightful and/or relevant language on tombstones that has asked to be captured, so I’ve reassembled some of it into this poem in which I articulate some COVID-19 fears and frustrations. A nod quickly here to a book by Allison Cobb called Green-Wood, published in 2010, though I only read it recently. It excavates historical, contemporary, and personal meaning from the same site that is offering me fresh air and succor during this weird time.

—Nada Gordon