FAMILY REUNION AND THE PANDEMIC
December, before she died on
Christmas Eve,
my cousin Nancy called Sally and me
to promise the Kendig Reunion
would still
happen on the Fourth of July as it
has
for decades. Yes of course, of
course.
By the first of June, we were
stricken
off course, two balls hit into a
bog.
The promise and the plague. And
us, sinking.
We took the penalty and put off
play
till Labor Day. We no longer labor
with that metaphor, now plan to
punt.
CAREENING THROUGH
SOCIAL MEDIA
I’m SkypingFace-TimingWhat’s Apping.
Soon: Zoom, with twenty-four
squares.
At a poetry reading
of one hundred,
I page through
screens to find friends.
The woman in
Wales where it’s midnight,
parents in Ohio
watching their daughter
in Wyoming
present her work, Ted’s siblings
show up (same last name at the bottom).
Then I sit in a meeting about our new platform
one we
stand in front of. Zoom
is out, zooms
off.
I wave as though to a departing colleague.
AND NOW THIS
Denver teachers called back
will be fired if they resist.
They hold a news conference,
make out their wills together.
Photos pop up online of Georgia
schools,
already in session, teens swarming
the halls,
kindergartners sitting close, no
masks. Georgia.
The NFL announces that players who
opt out
will receive $350,000 bonuses, but
only
if they are high risk. If they are
low risk,
they get $150,000. Ja’Wuan James
opts out.
WALKING DOWN THE STREET
I am stopped by a man who wants to know
if my hat is for Navy. “No, it’s my dad’s
Army Air Corps cap,” I say, hold it at arm’s length
so he sees the B-17. “Is he alive?” he asks.
“No, he died a year ago, age 93.”
The man seems stricken, embarrassed.
“I’m so sorry.”
“Oh, don’t be,” I say. “He ‘lived to be a gray-haired
wonder.’” I don’t say “and not to have lived locked up
separated from his family, waving from windows,
while 2,000 died alone in ‘homes.’”
In echelon, we carry on.
NOTE: If you are here for the poem and not for how my poetry sausage is ground, your work is done and you can skip this note. But for those interested, here is the background on my writing the poem.
The title and first seven and a half lines happened just like this, at least in my memory. So did lines 8, 9, and 10. Maybe I should have stopped here, but I was thinking about my dad and how much he loved the songs he learned in the Army Air Corps (which is today's U.S. Air Force). He taught them all to us kids, and I may have been the only eight-year girl who gleefully sang:
My gal's a corker,
She's a New Yorker,
I buy her everything
To keep her in style.
She wears silk underwear
I wear my G.I. pair,
Hey boys,
That's where my money goes.
That and the "Caissons Go Rolling Along," and our very favorite, now called "The U.S. Air Force Song." Why I looked it up today, I'll never know because I knew it by heart and sang it with my dad all the time. (Sometimes now I sing it to my dog while we walk, and I still end it with "Nothing can stop the Army Air Corps," instead of "Nothing can stop the U.S. Air Force.")
But when I looked it up, I realized there is a fourth verse we never sang. I loved this couplet:
If you'd live to be a grey-haired wonder
Keep the nose out of the blue
and I thought Dad would like being called a "grey-haired wonder" at least as much as being called 93 years old, and I thought about the final line, in echelon, we carry on. Yes, Yes we do.
I try to devote the first few minutes of the morning to what I call "centering" myself, sort of a poetry devotion. For months I have been reading a poem a day and writing a one-paragraph response or a possible poem prompt. For August, I am trying another exercise, to write a brief poem on life during the current plague. I tend to take days and weeks on a poem, not let it out forever. I am going to brave it and whip these little things out and share them in the moment. Here is the one for day 1, August 11th:
FIVE MONTHS LATER
We arrived home March 11th, feeling
wary, having visited a friend in a
halfway
house in Nashville, eaten out on
the road--
a meal we didn’t know would be the
last
of that, and cancelled our room at a hotel
in chaos for another that was quieter, left
it early the next morning with carryout coffee.
Then, we stayed in, stayed well, felt
lucky,
never knew it would be this long.
And it will be a lot longer.
