By the time we’re aware of it, fully aware, that is, it’s already too late, showing “fully” to be a fiction, not just “fully” but awareness itself, there being no difference between aware and fully aware, everything hopelessly partial, or hopefully partial, hope seeming to be what gets in the way of understanding just how dire the situation is, oh this problem will go away, it’s not that bad, there’s no need to be paranoid, look at all these idiots panicking on social media, they’re creating an alternate reality, or so I said as I traveled to attend the writing conference in another state, declaring, It’s not like the NBA is cancelling its games or schools are closing down, think of how many more tens of thousands of people are gathering for those things every day, then, two days after I got back, the NBA cancelled its games and schools started closing down, including my own, who’s the idiot now (you idiot), but I didn’t think that, still don’t think it, not really, even as I know I used to mock people who thought this was anything more serious than the seasonal flu, something I picked up from my new doctor, a Chinese guy in Chinatown who said he loved what the Coronavirus had done for him on the subway and at restaurants, now he just had to cough to clear out a whole section of a train during rush hour, he no longer had to wait to get seated at the most trendy Chinese restaurants, the authority of his mockery of white American paranoia passed on to me my own mockery, I saw the panic as another manifestation of racism, still see it that way, on some level, even as I wash my hands twenty times a day and mutter idiot under my breath at anyone who walks within six feet of me the few times I go out anymore, seething any time the President turns “Corona” into “Chinese” and infects idiots out there to yell at me to go home, but this doesn’t bother me, not really, or not fully, this kind of racism feels minor compared to the specter of hospitals barely breathable with bodies (mostly brown & black), unable to keep up with the onslaught of infection, or Vanda Piccioli, director of one of the last funeral homes remaining open in Bergamo, Italy, saying, “We take the dead from the morning till night, one after the other, constantly,” characterizing her job thusly: “You are a sponge and you take the pain of everybody,” which cut right through the nonsense, or sense, helping me imagine the scale of what’s happening — but not fully, not even close, not really, and that because what’s happening is still, for me, sadly (happily) a matter of the imagination, I haven’t seen the hospitals or funeral homes, haven’t seen anyone sick with the virus, don’t even know anyone yet who has it, only know what I see on a screen, which changes constantly, you shouldn’t wear a mask, you should wear a mask, you shouldn’t wear a mask, you should wear a mask, the director of the CDC comically (tragically) saying guidance on the use of masks is “being critically re-reviewed,” one doctor saying in the early going how you were more likely to be killed by lightning than the virus, what an idiot (you idiot), but was he actually wrong, or just not fully right, how do we know, I’ve seen more lightning bolts than people dying from the virus, the only “real” evidence I have drawn from the world’s withdrawal, stores and restaurants shuttered in my neighborhood, gym padlocked one night after I’d worked out there with nine people, then five, then one, the three nights before, forcing me onto the track across the street where joggers swerved away from each other across the lanes, or, most eerily, the BQE over the Kosciuszko Bridge entirely free of traffic during rush hour, a freedom I’ve never felt there before, making me almost giddy, was that fear you felt, no, not really, just a strange difference, a fascination at absence, if this is the apocalypse, I thought, it’s not how you imagined it. But did you imagine it, didn’t you rather have it imagined for you by the makers of spectacular fictions, who filled your mind with images of a world gone animal again, elemental, everyone smeared with their own shit stumbling around in fetid caverns such as the gutters in hell full of condemned souls must be, relieving themselves wherever they like because what does it matter, they’re all blind, they can only see white, or a man tearing open the throat of another man with his teeth to break free of a headlock as another man threatens to rape his son in front of him, or a husband abandoning his wife to save himself as they’re cornered by the flesh-eating infected, then later finding to his surprise and shame that she hasn’t turned when they’re reunited by chance in a safe zone, begging for her forgiveness, saying he was just terrified, kissing her to make up and discovering, too late, that she has been infected, but is just immune, instantly turning on her and gorging himself on her face as if in a vengeful rage, as if he blames her for tricking him like this when he thought he’d escaped by caring only for himself. This is the pandemic we deserve, isn’t it, the one that seems to happen by not happening, the asymptomatic infected thinking it’s happening someplace else and carrying on as usual, spreading the infection, the most powerful visual toll not the bodies of the dead, not the caregivers buried in protective gear, which barely dent our Netflixed imaginations, but the “Great Empty,” as the New York Times called it in a special Sunday section on March 29, all the places in the world emptied of their publics captured in full-page color photographs, the Place de la Concorde in Paris, the Spanish Steps in Rome, Times Square in New York, and this toll you can’t see except when gathered in a gallery, otherwise you’re in just one place at one time and likely not in one of these, and the photos are beautiful, not terrifying, distilling the aesthetics of social distancing, giving idiots (you idiot) incentive to venture out into #thegreatempty to Instagram it, imagine this pitched as apocalyptic cinema, perhaps Antonioni could do it, but only for a few minutes, what a flop, we’d sit there wondering when something was going to happen, is this all there is, where are the zombies, the savage acts, where are the cities reduced to rubble, where are the people, oh there, sitting at home, mostly (white) bored, staring at screens, frustrated they can’t find any more sanitizing wipes or toilet paper online, annoyed that packages are taking more than two days to arrive, doing more cooking and cleaning than usual, drinking more than usual, spending less money, worrying more about money, waiting for checks to arrive, applying for grants and loans, finally spending more time with the fam, making more of an effort to reach out to friends and ask them, actually kind of ask them, how they’re doing, and not just by sending a text but calling, doing more reading, finally attempting War and Peace (or not), making use of all the mindfulness apps they didn’t have time for before — is this the way the world ends? Not with a bang or a whimper but more time at home? More time for self-care? It’s a strange spectacle, this non-spectacle, instead of something alien to see we’re given ourselves, magnified in all our mundanity, lack of knowledge and imagination, and inequality, even those on the front lines, the doctors and nurses and EMTs, can’t see what they’re fighting, can’t even really be said to be fighting, as they don’t know enough about the virus to treat it, only how to try to make those suffering a little more comfortable, what’s most frightening is what’s not there, the threat of infection, the ventilators and masks running out, the beds running out, the space, the millions of jobs liquidated, cash and investments depleted, the virus most visible in how it’s devouring our infrastructure, while the only thing we can do, apparently, to stop it, according to what we know (but what do we know), or if not stop it, slow it down, is to be not there, to stay away from each other, stay away from places of business, which seems like a curious way to slow down, let alone stop, the collapse of the global economy, absurdly those of us more privileged sitting at home could be said to be more on the front lines than those actually putting their lives on the line because it’s up to us to stop the spread of infection by not doing anything, and what civic action is this, not doing as the new doing, not being there as the new being there, online as the front line, does this sound familiar, isn’t social distancing the dystopian dream of social media? Living in a world where going online to engage with it is the healthiest, most responsible way to be, where there’s no judgment about screen time or shaming about addiction to virtual reality because this is the new reality, the tweeting moral mobs and Insta-influencers have won? This is the reality we deserve, isn’t it, where we learn just how joyless is the world without the world (“damn,” Karen Chee tweets, “I am in New York and I miss New York so bad”), just how empty the community without bodies together in a room, just how socially distanced we already are, and how far gone we are, how we can only bring ourselves back by withdrawing even further into this reality where “your ZIP code is often a determinant of your health outcome,” as Mandy Cohen of the NC Dept. of Health and Human Services says, shedding, en masse, more black and brown and poor and old and sick and disabled bodies, doubling down on our segregation as a state-sanctioned matter of public health. There can’t be any talk of togetherness as a way out of this, can there, except by idiots (you idiot) who think “we’re all in this together” because the virus “doesn’t discriminate” between young and old, rich and poor, white and black, see, Tom Hanks got sick, Boris Johnson’s in intensive care, Fountains of Wayne dude died, sure (you idiot), but we discriminate, for every Tom Hanks who doesn’t die there are thousands who do because they lack access to health care or live in cramped quarters with two or three generations of their family or they’re old and already sick with something else so the ventilator they need gets passed to a younger person, I can’t believe I have to write this down — I was going to say “it makes me sick” but of course it doesn’t, I get to sit here and think about how privilege even gets revealed in figures of speech, who uses them and how, I don’t have to write this down, I get to write this down, of course I get to write this down, of course I can believe it, I go to sleep every night believing I’ll wake up the next morning, body and mind functioning, blessed with the right, the opportunity to write, blessed with even more time now to do so as I no longer have to commute to work in Connecticut three days a week, one of the silver linings (you idiot) of the pandemic, as I’ve been saying to friends, blessed to be able to enjoy silver linings (instead of redlining), blessed to have a job that can be moved online without much trouble, blessed (you idiot) by the many ways teaching is easier because my students are more relaxed and more focused on Zoom without the distractions and anxieties they have to deal with in the classroom, they can just chill in their beds, no one starts to pack up five minutes before the end of class anymore or checks the clock, or maybe I just don’t notice or care, as I’m looking at a screen with little thumbnails of their faces and don’t read anything into their bored expressions, as I would in the classroom, can’t read their body language, more silver linings (you Bradley Cooper), blessed to be running a business whose operations are run online, not in a building with a lease or mortgage, whose main source of revenue, poetry workshops, can be moved online and draw even more interest now that so many people are forced to stay at home, whose events, if cancelled, mean money saved, not lost, whose staff is small, part-time and can still be paid to do their work online, who knew it was such a blessing to be small? Blessed to be me, blessed to be me (how lucky for you, you fancy fuckface), this is just how things have worked out so far, things could have turned out very differently, my ambitions have always been to grow much bigger, to build my company to have a physical presence, to build my staff, to build beyond a life of teaching poetry, already my wife and I are looking to buy a second home upstate, to start a family, imagine if we’d just done that and the person renting our 1 BR in Williamsburg was suddenly unable to pay rent, making it impossible for us to cover both mortgages — yeah, just imagine (you idiot), we’d still be okay, it wouldn’t be “impossible,” both of our families have money, we’d figure it out — we’d get to figure it out — what a horror, not to be able to pay both mortgages, I can’t even believe I’m writing this down (you idiot), it doesn’t make me sick, what a failure of the imagination has gotten us here, we can’t see what we’re fighting because we couldn’t imagine being in this situation where we already were, blessed to be us, blessed to be us, now just waiting it out, unable to imagine anything but ourselves, blessed by everything, as the famous poet once said, everything we look upon is blessed.

Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.