On the anniversary of lockdown orders around the world, and in honor of all the many humans still struggling on.
Here is to all the writers, staring blankly at a wall that looks just like the blinking cursor on the empty page. To all the creatives who have seen only the same square of sky, the apartment parking lot, watched the same scraggly cherry tree flower, and leaf out, and fade, and stand winter bare. To every exhausted, scattered, tired head.
For a year now there have been no jazz clubs to gently paper over the inside of our well with the creative jam of others, patching up the chinks in our leaky old cistern with music dark and sweet as syrup. There have been no concerts so loud the music reverberated through our bones and imprinted itself deep in the recesses of our brain.
There have been no delightful discoveries: the little restaurant you’d never seen before between 2nd and 3rd street behind the grocery, the one with four tables and the owner who dances about with his special hot sauce festooning your plate with the taste of baking Spanish hills.
There have been no puffs of hot moist air meeting you where the eggshell that is our airliner opens into a new place that smells like “we’ve never been.” No limitless horizons to explore, no streets we haven’t walked.
For most of us our world has shrunk to four walls, a hurried dash through the grocery store, and perhaps (if it isn’t the same four walls) the place we work.
My love and I lay in each other’s arms and he mused that we used to lay just like that and talk for hours, “what would we talk about now?” I ask, “everything that happens to me you were there for this year.” There is no news to tell that does not come in through chiming alerts we hope aren’t bad news, this time.
The fields of our hearts lie fallow.
We can stand at the edge of them and curse the lost harvest, lament what isn’t growing, or we can sit down there in the warm furrows and smell the weeds, feel the thin summer sun on our face, crumble the soil between our fingers, learning its texture, its taste.
I wrote a poem once, in another lifetime, that my eyes had worn the landscape thin staring through an office window into hope. I meant of course that I felt bored, caged. But I wonder now.
Because my eyes have stared out this same window here next to my writing chair for a year. I have watched the old apple and cherry clinging to life at the edge of the woods. Seen their enthusiastic messy blooms, their first green leaves, the sacrament of their fruit slowly ripening in the long hot days of August, and the tender offering of fall drifting down to feed the earth. Have I worn them out then, or consecrated them with my watching? Have they consecrated me with their looking back, marking my movements and the moments of my days as we live here next to one another?
When there is nowhere to go does it allow our roots to go deep for the first time, sinking into the good earth with a relieved sigh. Rushing generations coming to a shuddering halt, dropping their baggage and laying down beneath the snow white petals to peer at this new blue roof?
I have names now, for clumps of early bulbs scattered throughout the neighborhood. I know which come up first, and where. I know, when the sun is high as the temperature, where there are patches of water cooled shade to rest beside. I know the dogs, fierce behind their fences, and the fellow wanderers bundled against the cold. We nod, a moment, we are seen and it is perhaps enough. For now.
Here is to you, wondering why you are so tired, empty, worn thin. Here’s to you, pouring out your life because the need has not ceased, but the feast of this world has become a meagre meal of way bread, hard and course against your tongue.
Climb down into your dry well and taste the stones, full of the memory of water; flavored with all the places those past floods traveled to reach you. All the bright shores they once knew. Follow the salty taste of the sediment there at the bottom of the well you’ve drunk so dry, like roots through hard packed clay, teasing cracks through bedrock. Break through inside yourself to where water no well can reach dwells, dark and dreaming.
And drink there, in the dripping darkness of your sacred soul until the rains come again; and until we can dance to the sound of saxophone, drum, and shared joy.
