We’re writing this poem together
in this house
during the pandemic
We don’t have much choice
The house is small –
Hey! Get out of the doorway!
The pandemic is long –
I’ve fallen in and out of love
with you three times since it started
There are only so many home repairs that
you can do to distract yourself
There are only so many YouTubes that you
can watch
Two years in you finally give up and share a
piece of paper and a pen
like that long-lost newlywed poem we wrote
together in a car before a Conklin Barn gig.
Nothing is lost on this pandemic.
It works on every nerve
It corrupts every cheery smile
It puts wedges and winces and second guessing
between every social interaction
Every relationship is either too close or too far
Even my mother avoids us
The pandemic used to chase me to parks and beaches for fun
Now it just corrals me in the house
to hide from others and shop online
The quarantine is hovering in the background of every breath
It begs us to eat and eat and eat
As we are in the – what is it — 5th wave
there are times that I feel that we are
only bound together by the contrariness of
everyone else’s pandemic rules and the superiority
of our own household rules
when we are too cowardly to admit
that we are as powerless as King Canute
yelling at the waves to stop
Oh! Another literary reference
I have heard so many of your tedious stories
these past 22 months or so.
I am not sure I can take one more,
So, please keep the rest of this poem simple
No science references, John Lennon origin stories
or aha commentary on child rearing.
Here are some other things I can’t take
one more of:
Our public library changing their mind if the toddler classes
are in person or virtual
The CDC telling me which masks are preferred, or work best,
or work best but I shouldn’t hoard them
People who are too afraid to meet you at the playground
one day and show up three days later
with a tan from Disney World
Asking you to move because I need to reach the sink
I guess this happened before the pandemic,
but now it happens so much, so very, very much,
with all the eating and locking down and
hiding out, someone is always
standing at our sink, and someone else is always
in need of a glass of water
to go with the food they should not be eating again,
so soon after lunch.
Eating is solid, consistent, real. A reminder that
we still have a sense of taste.
Something to hold onto in the waves
of change. More than just the Deltas and Omicrons.
There was the sudden decision to shut down a workplace
and sudden transition to remote work with all of the
quandries about fairness
There was walking into Stop & Shop to buy
Sympathy cards for 4 different families at the same time and finding
half of the cards sold out. There is the constant
calculus to cancel a birthday party or a fundraiser. . . .
Yeah, and there are new social constructs to learn:
drive by retirement parties, and Zoom birthday parties
and hybrid fundraisers and asking yourself
“Is anyone going to show up in person for this event?
And, if they do, will they all get sick and blame me?”
. . . There were the judgments
about whether we needed to clean our groceries or
leave delivery boxes outside for 48 hours.
And wondering, “What if there is chocolate in that box?”
There was hand wash singing until the skin was raw as our nerves.
The worry about vulnerable loved ones and how much to avoid them.
The question of where to get toilet paper and are we hoarding
You took so long to write the last part,
you made me miss the end of my
timed social media clothing sale on the computer.
This pandemic has been too much about
computers and missing things.
But as you can see, the pandemic would
not have been so bad if you had not made
long, academic references to the classics,
or told those depressing daily death stories about
the stationary store.
So that’s it.
I am done with you,
with the pandemic,
and even with eating.
There must be something left online that takes
me far enough from you and this pandemic
to have a moment of freaking peace.