Norman Fischer, Poem Series
Corona Virus Poems
3/16/20
This disconcerting monologue
Bearing weight in each direction
Hearing words
Heaving, heaving
Would aloft
Fill the air with force
Quiet in the quiet spaces
A little virus alive and not
Goes in proper sharing
Puts the people in their places
Charts, graphs, numbers
People singing on porches
People howling like dogs
Applause for people singing on porches
And howling as dogs
Their joy
Not gathering in airports or ships
The elderly must shelter in place
See pictures of places that are not those places
For the modern self there are larger numbers
Such harm as we could project
Take care to withhold embraces
Against little invisible points
—
The man with the crumpled hat
An ink-washed mountain high in Chinese air
Little farmer in foreground pulls little ox
Who does not want to go
Are the children near?
Are the children ready?
Whole past in time’s kernel
Tiny virus stopping clouds
Dispersing crowds
In bars and stores and open spaces
The white bear falls out of view
His species all but shuttered
Trials and tribulations
Food to eat, then sleep
—
Scrub jay pokes in grass
Purple finch bobs on bush
Like a boxer
Whose orange face does the steeplejack see
In mirror of destiny?
It hardly matters
A god arrives
Striped and singing
Pirouettes and panjandrums
A little virus mighty in its simple strength
Pinch him he will bleed
No end to his mercy
—
Out walking
On pavement on dirt
Landscape, hillside, brush
Pieces of persons pigeonholed
By prearrangement otherwise predicted
This is you
Under sky
A tiny virus anyone’s lover
Peaceful and simple good as gold
Night falls all round like a crumpled hat
Quiet so we can die in peace
A tall tree separates one
From one on the other side
Of the innocent virus
Holiday for humans
Hushed within sacred time-forests
—
This quiet poem barely whispers
At night in a lonely home
The dark desert sky
Full of tweeting stars
Hearts beat and care
About others, self
As far as substance provides
Food for the invalids and preachers
Who visit for succor
People nurse each other
In tempered times
For a little eager virus
Knows its lightness
Follows threads of fragrant hair
And lips and teeth
Veils across the avenues
No one levels the streets
But breathing understands
—
3/19/20
the danger’s everywhere the
contamination. in the
poetic spaces—
where a small round bright red
nobble
lurks….
blame the others!
not enough time to settle scores
wipe surfaces
wipe all surfaces
wipe wipe wipe wipe wipe
but trust the food
—
and the rain
that fell last night
on the bingo tables?
can the man
who fell down the stairs
to do away with himself
be part of this scene too
though by now it is clearing?
or the winter storms—
it’s far from clearing
nor is it marigold time
sometimes you fumble
before starting
at first we thought, well, we’re old
but then it seemed, no, we’re
crude and this is our due
such magnificent if fungible creatures
_
The things we want, sighs or horror
This is not marigold time
Trees lit yellow in sunlight
People lashed to masts
Of places they live in
The future’s darkness calls
Us to games of fortune
To beweep our outcast state
With bootless cries
And curse our fate
Not even a bug could be so light
How quick the change arrived
How soon the shouting stopped
Imagine great rewards
When the jitter fades
And the bowl turns upside down
_
Grow now your garden upon a hill
Loose your coins in sunlight
Take my hand it is clean
There’s no more distance
The woman who meets us says
_
3/21/20
There’s a formal pattern
To these heart-tearing numbers
Apart in early spring
Terrible spring in silence
This virus
Shatters a pattern of daily life
Tears hearts’ patterns each day of spring
Spent at home in silence
Had we reckoned this pattern
Of daily life nourished hearts
In the first place? Its spring
Too tightly coiled repressing silence
A need to expose the pattern
That soothes and softens hearts
Allowing spring’s quickening
To crack a static silence
This formal daily life’s pattern
Of eating sleeping being informed heart-
Ily shakes in us dreams that spring
Forth each night forgotten in silence
Of passing days whose pattern
Repeats, bludgeoning hearts
To obedience this strange spring
Terrible spring in silence
_
Who we are now
We’re no longer our
Activity our words
Where find
Identity with trees
Swamped by night
As if not there
Though we think we know they are
And loved ones become pictures
We reach out to
And believe again
As we once believed in an absent
God Sunlight on hillside
Birds still sing
Normalcy waits and wavers
_
trees’ nearness
And human subservience
In face of unheard calling
Step up to moral philosophy
As a way of life a way to eat
Food distributed daily
Eating, sleeping
Necessary activities
Breathing, walking, speaking
A bow sweeping strings
Flower melodies sweet
In early quiet spring
The many the few
The greater the lesser
The good the bad the guilty and the just
Wonder together
In crimson weather
Awaiting tigers
_
3/23/20
How much is too much
In escalating numbers?
What’s the highest conceivable number?
Old people die anyhow
Young people reckon
Citizens wave like flags in their houses
Pictures of people repeating on screens
Grateful phrases appear as memes
For people who need people
Such people are the luckiest people
And people who don’t need people
Are hardly people
Or so the song says
—
Tiny virus has no need
Of others
Its RNA
In harmony with
Traffic patterns
At edge of substance-fiction
It repeats itself in throngs
Plays a melody ranges up and down
—
3/24/20
Virus swept the land from under us
Opened like an enclosing umbrella
Sheltering in place alone and together
Inside we waited, outside
Rain and blue skies alternated
We did not know when to die
And when to insist on our need
Virus took the chairs and tables
The doors the woodwork we walk-
Ed gingerly about staying clear
As virus paused, rushed again
Up the scale of dismal notes
Then smiled, frowned,
Rushed again
Looking up
Virus swelled us to dizziness
Neither laughed nor cried
Brought us to size
And we died against our judgments
It hurt a while
But left a certain quiet in our eyes
(after Jack Spicer)
Laura Hinton, “Winter Trees Know Covid’s Comin.’”
(Photos taken in the Alpes Maritimes foothills, South of France, January 2020)