upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

There was something about how it felt. Not just the during —
That rough churn of bulk and breath, limb and tooth, the mass of us,
The quickness we made and rode — but mostly the before.

The waiting, knowing what would become. Pang. Pleasure then pain.
Then the underwater ride of after. Thrown-off like a coat over a bridge.
Somehow you’d just give away what you’d die without. You just gave.

The best was having nothing. No hope. No name in the throat.
And finding the breath in you, the body, to ask.

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

11,398 Dead

91,912 Recovered

Alien abductions: None (That I can recall)

Rolls of Toilet Paper Remaining: 3

Clone Wars Episodes Watched: 1, "Unfinished Business" 

Black Hawk Down: Completed

Poisonwood Bible: Page 370

History Notes: Incomplete (Why read history when we're surviving it right now)

Public Restrooms: Closed (Please McDonald's, I just got to pee)

At the Nation's Capital: Jefferson still standing, Lincoln still sitting, Trump nowhere to be see (while driving past the White House from a moving vehicle)

The Amish: still chillin' in their buggies (No bread discovered however)

The Cherry Blossom Trees: Bloomin' 

With no goals clear.

Placed near those you scold,

Or those held dear.

Some used to this fate,

And some quite not.

We can only debate

What we have lost.

Some say it’s the end of the world, oh no,

For people like me don’t believe that so.

A whole four weeks stuck at home,

It’s just like snow, but nature can roam.

There’s nothing lost to people used to this qualm,

But for those unacquainted, try not to becalm.

And as night rises up from grass
and comes down from the clouds,
bats at top speed merely glance
off of what they disturb.

I admire their graceful swoops,
and the brilliance of moles carving tunnels
under lawns, feeling their whiskery way
as they go. I even praise the cat,

its savage patience and quick paws.
And feel a camaraderie with the earthworm,
straightforward but slippery, both ends open,
getting under the feet of barefoot girls.

Unlike you and me, they have no choice.
They themselves are evidence
of what can be done conspicuously,
or under cover, without remorse.

Whereas the animal I cannot help but be,
having more than once been found out,
taken to task, envies still the silver fox
leaving a false trail, swerving this way, then that.

BY DONALD JUSTICE

It's snowing this afternoon and there are no flowers.

There is only this sound of falling, quiet and remote,

Like the memory of scales descending the white keys

Of a childhood piano—outside the window, palms!

And the heavy head of the cereus, inclining,

Soon to let down its white or yellow-white.

Now, only these poor snow-flowers in a heap,

Like the memory of a white dress cast down . . .

So much has fallen.

                                    And I, who have listened for a step

All afternoon, hear it now, but already falling away,

Already in memory. And the terrible scales descending

On the silent piano; the snow; and the absent flowers

      abounding.

and shaped like glass. Our skin is full of holes
for oil and sweat. When I whisper, Breathe me in,

I mean all of me—the scent of my flesh, but also me,
my god, the beginning of the fulfillment of this desire.

In a mask, you can be whoever I want you to be, king
or dog: muse comes from muzzle, to track your kill.

The plague doctors wore masks in the shape of a bird,
the beak filled with fresh clippings: juniper, rose, clove.

The mask is a type of respirator, meaning breathe again,
which is how we’ve managed to stay alive all these years.

Through the glass eyes, they could examine the body
they could not touch with their bare hands.

Breath can be both instinctive and controlled.
Matisse’s most famous cutout is “Blue Nude II,”

a woman who appears to be made of parts, but who
was scissored instead from a single sheet of paper.

3.30 The New Yorker

Now children have, basically, a long, strange, twisted vacation. Yes, for many, school is continuing, but it’s not taking the same number of hours, and all their after-school activities are off, too. This opens up a vast swath of free time that many children and teens have never had before. It can turn into a period of growth — mentally and emotionally.

Though not every youngster will become an Einstein while quarantining, many seem to be turning into the kids they would have been if they’d grown up a generation or two earlier, with more time to discover their real interests and hobbies (remember those days?), before childhood got so structured and busy.

On a distant hill, a tiny silhouette appears, gliding on air. A boy on a scooter. My son begins waving frantically, like a marooned sailor spotting the rescue chopper. “Hey, kid!” But the boy’s mother sees us and leads him in the opposite direction. “No kids,” my son says, bewildered and then resigned. I sit between two large rocks, eating sunshine with him. A lizard does pushups. Two sunburned white guys in their sixties stroll by, chatting about the secrets they keep from their wives. “Hey, nice to have a big guy with you at a time like this,” one of them says, patting my son on the back. I freeze, say nothing.

A mother and her four-year-old daughter join us; we keep accidentally closing the gap between our bodies and apologizing. Our kids want to play chase. No, we say. My son, who has an extraordinary legal mind, suggests a loophole: can they run next to each other? “We won’t catch each other,” he promises. The other mother coughs, and apologizes; almost balletically, we separate the children. My son follows without a peep of protest, a docility that frightens me, as whatever my face is doing seems to be frightening him.

A few months ago, in this same park, I’d look skyward at this hour to clock the moment when a great scattering of starlings begins to wheel as one. Called murmurations, these flocks gather in the purple Texas dusk. Spiky iridescent birds that stitch themselves into a single animate cloud. (Starlings are an invasive species; in 1890, a Shakespeare enthusiast released sixty starlings into Central Park, as part of a whimsical mission to introduce to North America every bird ever mentioned in Shakespeare’s works; today we have two hundred million.) These enormous flocks can execute sharp turns and vortical spins with a magical-feeling coördination. A thousand starlings bunch into a living fist over the trees, relax westward, shear away behind the eastern skyscrapers. With a kind of muscular clairvoyance, each bird seems to anticipate the movements of the others. What is deciding them? What permits a thousand autonomous actors to move as one body, at these unbelievable speeds?

A recent study described how these birds are able to “manage uncertainty in consensus”: “Flocks of starlings exhibit a remarkable ability to maintain cohesion as a group in highly uncertain environments and with limited, noisy information.”

Rolling the stroller down the hill, I wave to strangers on their porches. Wind chimes cast their melancholy spell, as the skyline turns into a pink Stonehenge. Two boys are dribbling a basketball in the growing dark, their tiny eyes peering out from a garage. Nobody crosses the six-foot barrier; you might argue that humans have never been less like a flock than at this moment of voluntary isolation. But I also feel that our stasis is itself a kind of secret flight. Externally, we are all separating from public spaces, cancelling weddings and graduations, retreating into our homes. This physical separation belies what is happening on another plane: people are responding to the crisis with a surprising unity. More swiftly than I would have thought possible, hundreds of millions are heeding a difficult call to stay at home. It’s a way of soaring into formation. And yet “murmuration” seems like the right word for the great convergence of humans travelling through this time together, listening to the latest news with our whole bodies, alert to subtle atmospheric changes, making constant recalibrations in response to the fluxing crisis at speeds to rival the dervishing starlings. How rapidly we are adjusting our behavior, to protect one another. ♦