Traveling in Tiger Rain

The world’s out there, beyond the pretty curtain

bought on budget from World Market.

Through red-threaded poppies I can see

the oak outside leaning towards me,

midday light on clumps of new leaves.

The tree is faint, but real, unlike the print

hanging on my wall – Japanese rain

as straight lines aslant, striking

hay bales, umbrellas, cloaked figures

with faces turned away, a horse with rider

just ten steps from the village, and then

the sea beyond, where three fishing skiffs,

each with one wet man,

are caught in this imagined squall.

The street narrows at the first house,

its door open and lit. No one’s running,

they know where they are.

Is it real? I’m there as much as here.

Viral Load

They like dark, wet places in the house

to hide in, dividing, crowding out

the prior tenants. Unasked,

they plaster over walls,

paste the rooms with stucco. O₂

wants to get out but can’t push through

new sheetrock. Meanwhile, outside,

the flow of traffic slows, blood cells

en route to the heart sputter, the city

lights blink out until the whole

power plant shuts down. Auxiliary

generators brought in aren’t enough.

What’s left isn’t a metaphor. It’s us.

At Arm’s Length

Like walking into the kitchen to find

Ingmar the iguana curled on the burner

unfold his legs and ricochet

against the wall. Smack. Falling

to the floor. It’s your job

to soothe him, his owners gone

for the week and you can’t even

keep the matches away. He’s got

some bad-looking splotches of char.

You remember other babysitting fails,

chasing those farm kids upstairs

who just laughed, swinging a rat trap,

you springing it with a hairbrush,

finally letting them watch TV

till the parents’ car lights appeared.

No wonder the prof on the promotion

committee could see right through you,

can’t believe you take late papers.

It’s payback. Who knew how much

the prison job would suit you,

cons in ill-fitting uniforms saying

“ma’am” to your face. It’s always the guards

to steer clear of. Like a reflex.

You remember the inmate doing time

for armed robbery, a 7-Eleven,

who walked you back to the cell block

just to say he’d get the degree,

make good on it, he promised,

and he put his hand out

and you, of course, shook it.

Measuring the Oak

I lay a length of twine across the broadest

width of the trunk and balance on a root,

feeling around the tree

with twine gripped in my fingers,

pressing against the bark

so it sticks. I must look like a lover

hugging a very fat man. Like Frida and Diego,

late in his life, their second marriage,

when her sap and his could not disband

though they tried. My son studies them

and is fed up with Diego, can’t understand

why he’d take so many women,

even Frida’s sister, to bed with him.

Narcissists, he says, believe their lives

are more meaningful than others’.

They are also often depressed.

Nineteen years old, what he fears most

is mental illness, dissociation from the self.

Is there no reassurance, nothing

I can say to him? First,

measure the tree in inches, divide by pi,

then multiply by five if it’s a red oak.

By this method the coast live

oak outside our kitchen door

is 142 years old. The bark is rough

against my cheek, smells faintly of coal.

I press in, as if for a blessing,

not ready to let go.

Means of Survival

The ants act like they’ve lost something.

They cross and recross the same plank

of wood, dipping their feelers

below deck, as if there they’d find

the dropped contact lens, that crumb

of bread, a misplaced egg.

They look bewildered, bereft,

like a mom whose kid went missing

at Food Mart, who felt those seconds

before finding him

one aisle over, holding a Snicker’s bar,

to be the last of her life.

But the ants aren’t frantic, are they?

They check each crack, climbing

over the garden hose, fallen leaves.

One comes back towards me

gripping an insect, holding it high

in front the way we carry a baby.

Only not that way – unlike us,

with our uncertainties

about virus loads, infection rates,

whether to touch door knobs,

canned goods, the mail, each other, our face,

the ant runs back to its nest

to eat this flimsy carapace.

Shelter in Place, Sixth Week

But humans still make plenty of racket.

Road crews are at it,

chewing up asphalt, laying drains.

The neighbor, who’s usually so quiet,

shouts at her son,

“Don’t touch that again!”

Just this morning, ambulance sirens, twice.

Kids skid down the street

on outgrown scooters

just to get out of the house.

Out on the porch,

behind the fence,

as far as the curb,

we wonder aloud what’s for lunch.

And then there’s my son

who, still “in school,”

logs on for aural drills.

Until 8 pm,

when the whole town howls,

you’d never guess anything was amiss.

Across the Barrier

Six days of protests in weather calm

enough to launch a rocket.

It lifts from its own fire

through a few clouds,

the camera in someone’s hands unsteady

following the flame

as it passes maximum pressure

into a deeper blue, while

down here gravity keeps its grip

on rocks and rubber bullets,

ensures the shattered glass,

the arc of another shot.

Blood streams down, not up, pools

like spent fuel in the streets.

The people are trying to speak

but words go only so far

and raised hands are hard to see

through tear gas and smoke.

Yet – even so – across the barrier

a hand clasp

caught by a cell phone.

Brief as a synapse,

then lost

among the frayed nerves

where gravity holds

a man crawling to the curb

while, up there, released from earth,

those others

float like impossible swans

in self-protective suits.

Reading Szymborska in a Time of Plague

In this book of poems

two pages are mysteriously splotched,

pages 185 and 201,

where drops spread

across not the most profound lines

but not the most ordinary either,

as if she had thought

of something else

in that moment

between writing “the grass is green”

and “as is normal with grass.”

Maybe she was interrupted

by a knock on her study door,

a step on the porch,

an unexpected call

when everyone had gone to bed –

a call that brought bad news,

a joyful announcement,

a difficult choice.

At that moment tears fell

on ink not yet dry,

leaving a faint stain

but keeping the words intact,

traces of whatever had happened

outside the room

of this bound book.

My Son Says

Humans are the least evolved,

coming so late to the planet. He’s fixing

his own dinner – ramen, broth, sprigs

of arugula. I watch his deft hands

arrange components

in the frame of the bowl. Like

the titmouse nest that preceded us.

Chrysalis. Honeycomb. Sunflower

labyrinth of the puffer fish. Aesthetics

serve the lineaments of desire

and desire is the root of hunger

and do roots feel? Potato vines seek

aloft the taut string, hold themselves up

without muscle. Cells are the smallest

unit of consciousness, he says

and digs in like the wolfish dogs he loves,

plant life metabolized into his

particular body. A fly dives into the room,

works out its angles

with algebra my son says

he’ll forget after the test, while

the fly makes elegant cosines,

understands where your hand will land

before you make a move.

What blunderous creatures we are,

holding cell phones to our heads,

unable to interpret our own pheromones.

He slurps the last forkful of noodles,

puts his bowl in the sink,

makes to go

so I have to call out the obvious –

Dearest, wash that dish.

Getting and Spending

So much time spent ordering online,

so much boxed up and sent back.

The kitchen floor has a stack

of stuff nearly blocking the door.

There’s the dust-buster that never

kept its promise, there’s the lunch box

bought for school then pushed

behind the breakfast bars.

Christmas gift tags that weren’t packed away,

darts for a gun that vanished.

What to do with these three dice?

With stuffed toys, their fur still intact,

each of their names so easily recalled?

Must we keep a wind-up caterpillar?

This balsa sailboat no one ever liked?

Our closets fill as if to build

ramparts shored against unhappiness.

Tomorrow, we say, tomorrow,

we’ll give away that bag of Legos,

that doll with the velvet dress.

But not the basket of embroidery floss

(no one embroiders in this house)

nor the hanging terrarium

with its dead twigs and plastic moss.

Caudal Autotomy

Even with their faces shrunk

to stamp-sized squares on a screen,

the professors are still afraid.

More afraid. He called for an increase

in pixels, she cautioned for less, and

later it was a matter of skirting

the poison oak. Drop a bucket

on a lizard clumsily

and all you get is a twitching

tail. I did that when a kid.

I thought I’d killed my lizard

until my mother taught me

caudal autotomy. Since then

I’ve seen how it works

in humans – it doesn’t.

We need fairly everything we’ve got.

Which explains a lot.

Some prefer to keep their faces sheeted,

some go mute, some are still learning

how to insert words into space

even without the current pandemic.

Sure, I’ve sent a few emoji,

been caught by click bait.

I’ve pretended to teach in a cloud.

Like you, I’ve had my share

of amputations. Still.

It’s hard to unmute for the joke.

When the host leaves

and the silenced screens go dark,

one by one the families come

out to face the emptied streets and sky,

hearing the sirens go by,

singing from their balconies.