PANDEMIC FUGUE
I
These are the skies of my childhood
cloudbanks incandescent against a deepening blue
and the earth strangely still below
still but not silent birds chorusing
at daybreak at dusk so like the cusps
of night in childhood a rasp of rain
stirring in the leaf-haze no whirr of traffic
no planes above the river
only clouds that flare like festival lanterns
against a deepening blue as if this
were an earlier world the unmapped earth
of ice-fields marshlands forests
circling seasons migratory wonder
not a world on fire
II
Is the world on fire
clouds like funeral lamps
hanging in a fever dream
delirium contagion
gurneys crammed in corridors
sirens chorusing across a thousand cities
while the unharmed stay at home
watching in wonder as their neighborhoods
grow wilder deer scuffling
in the April brush rabbits in the garden
redbud seedlings swaying
by a shuttered shop
alleyways in bitter blossom
sky a color I’d almost forgotten
III
The sky’s a color I’d almost forgotten
fathomless blue of skies over the mountains
where I walked when I was young
unharmed within a wildness
that I’ve forsworn terrified I’ll vanish
into thinning air why take a risk
when I can lean against my window
fortunate sequestered surveying
the local world at daybreak at dusk
no traffic above us
no traffic on the greening ground
cars parked by the millions
on city streets in fields and barns
deserted rides at the end of the carnival
IV
Deserted rides at the end of a carnival
just before the lines are cut the plugs are pulled
though even now the sky puts on a show
clouds drift like fire balloons past
sickroom windows but who can look out
when monitors are measuring each
movement breath-beat heartbeat
sounding alarms through the floodlit hours
delirium contagion gurneys wheeled
in terror down the crowded corridors
oh where are their families now
the ones who left them here alone
snared in a fever dream feral
as a fox on the streets of the city
V
Flash of a fox on the streets of the city
and a park becomes a wilderness
time turns back on itself disencumbering hours
complicating lifetimes do you think
we’re growing younger as the built world falters
what was commerce what was city life
we walk beside the river in the burning hour
dusk a shade of red that reels into blue
a shift we call evening
and watch the light blaze violet
along the boughs of sycamores
their dry leaves wide as faces in a dusk
so like the dusks we haunted once
in bright gauze masks
VI
In my bright cloth mask
my mask of gratitude and guilt
my mask of confusion
I step outside in half-light
the color of my age
deer a silvered throng
idling on the autumn lawn
songbirds in leaf-haze
inviolable enchanted free
which I thought myself to be
when I was a child
tearing through the tall grass
at the end of our street
a fire in the edge-land
VII
Fires course through edge-lands
all across the West
turn the air a sour gold
visible from space
while the virus burns its way
around the earth unseen
we shelter in the local world
leaf-strewn blocks tricked out
with skeletons and headstones
bats strung like market goods
from tree to tree how
eerily the phantoms shimmer
in and out of sight underneath
the skies of childhood
