Lower the lifeboats—
We tread nose-deep in the plague—
Lifelines beyond us.
We roil dark water and sink.
The mermaids sing for no one.
“I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.”
— T.S. Eliot / “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
“The words are growing in the field, and they hover above the page. They’re like flowers, and I pick the ones I like. My eye is roaming all over, trying to make connections.”
— Mary Ruefle / Hyperallergic interview
Maria slipped through the mangrove swamps—apropos, considering the strangeness of the inland country—all manner of bird calls but not a single bird visible.
She retraced the miles back south to her home town by the sea—but was chased out by the ever widening viral curtain, it swept out in waves from the airports, inundated the ports, and streamed in with the masses of vacationers flowing south.
Now she was certain that her hopeful attempt to visit the past was a mistake, and her family was in the throes of the viral avoidance two-step. It was a most foul dance. It was the most unfortunate of synchronicities.
The virus was traveling untrammeled via the interstates—it was flooding the country: north, south, east, west. The streets were teeming with virus. The waysides and rest stops on the road, the restaurants and inns, all points billowed with bugs. Tidal wave after tidal wave of sickness.
There was plannifying and scarifying required. She’d lay low back among the mangroves and cottonmouths, and figure out her next move.
“Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are
laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.”
— Joy Harjo / “Perhaps the World Ends Here”
Maria moved further north, and inland, away from her home town—away from the hassle of hipster hoodoo.
A transmission blared:
… don’t bring me no corner gape, nothing eager, and nothing to prance about. No soap. No soap anywhere. Here the talk is cadaverous. Here the talk is all plate glass and metal angles. Who comes here to make the beds and wash the dishes. Let’s hurry to the dark alleys of hideous intent, and chicken shacks without shoes, and full o’ blues …
It landed with a thud and black douse. Sensible things were for silly rabbits, and Maria ate him for a grand Christmas meal. The only sense was in the the insensate. Like a garden variety croton, Maria set out to festoon the town in a sensoria of senselessness. To appease and applause.
“The confusion is not my invention. We cannot listen to a conversation for five minutes without being acutely aware of the confusion. It is all around us and our only chance now is to let it in. The only chance of renovation is to open our eyes and see the mess. It is not a mess you can make sense of.”
— Samuel Beckett / Columbia University Forum 4
“The lands and waters they gave us did not belong to them to give. Under false pretenses we signed. After drugging by drink, we signed. With a mass of gunpower pointed at us, we signed. With a flotilla of war ships at our shores, we signed. We are still signing. We have found no peace in this act of signing.”
— Joy Harjo / Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poems
Well, it didn’t snow in the south on Christmas, and certainly not in Maria’s home town by the sea.
Now, the only thing Maria wanted for Christmas was a plague doctor’s mask—with a bonafide beak protuberance for aromatics—and an ankle length black leather cloak, and the wide flat hat.
Oh, the places she could roam!
She looked under the tree and found a small box tagged with her name. She ripped the wrapping off and saw N-95 printed on the box.
Maybe next year, she said.
If there is a next year, said Mr. Munchems.
Mr. Munchems, you can be such a bore, she said to her rabbit.
Listen, Maria, you can’t always get what you want, Mr. Munchems said between nibbles of dandelion greens, but you take what you need, and pass the love along.
But Mr. Munchems, she said, in this world that seems so bereft of love and good will, what is there to take but bad vibes?
What year do you think this is kid, 1969? Bad vibes? Mr. Munchems said. You do what you can. You get ‘bad vibes’ and you turn them into … uh … uh, lemonade … yeah, lemonade!
Mr. Munchems, I think you’re nuts, Maria said. You’ve been eating to many mushrooms.
Listen, kid. Just try and make the world a little bit better place than you found it. Start here at home. Then your neighborhood. Then your home town. Concentric circles, kid. Just circle out in ever-widening ‘good-vibe-osity!’
Maria struck with a grand idea …
That night the family enjoyed a most good-humored meal—Rabbit Terrine.
A very merry to all, and to all a good bite!
“You don’t write to make friends.”
— Joy Williams
Maria thought it should snow in the south—in her home town, just for one day.
After all, hadn’t Mrs. Claus superseded the Heat Miser’s restrictions and gone straight to Mother Nature to get the override for a white Christmas down south?
Maria thought Miami needed a good blanketing in something pure—a good dousing of snow before the ice disappeared from earth all together. Climate scientists were now speculating that there would be an ice-free earth sometime before 2050.
Why not?
A matriarchal pact was cobbled out with Mother Nature—the Miser brothers were an afterthought.
If you need something done—and done right—get a woman for the job.
And it was done.
Why not?
“Oh, Cassandra, for Heaven’s sake let us devise a method by which men may bear children! It is our only chance.”
— Virginia Woolf / “A Society”
Maria awoke with a fitful start.
She palmed her phone and furiously tapped an email to the reindeer:
Dear ‘Deer,
Stay home this year.
Santa has underlying conditions: a 35 BMI, high blood pressure, a touch of asthma, and according to my calculations—he’s well over 65 years of age.
Tell the elves, for social distance sake, to take the workshop outdoors—plus, it’s temperate now in the North Pole.
Then she pictured how climate change might have altered the tundra into a swamp—the taiga was a wonderful breeding place for all the beasties of the Culicidae.
Oh, this Christmas could suck! She wrote. But even the mosquitoes deserve a blood meal or two. Let’s take it outdoors and do the best we can.
Then she went back to bed to sleep it off. She wished to sleep through the plague and wake up when it had vanished.
Instead, she had nightmares of skiing down scree fields through veils of plaguey mosquitoes.
“And in short, I was afraid.”
— T.S. Eliot / “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
She wrote in minuscule
Handwriting—
On a cuneiform roll
She cut and pasted silly
Putty—
In canted abandon
She printed the word
Anocracy—
A word unknown
She layered a palimpsest
Thick—
With self-inflicted pain
She built the word piles
High—
She tried.
She failed.
She failed again.
She failed better.
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
— Samuel Beckett / Worstward Ho!
This is what winter looked like in the southern city which was once her home town. She’d forgotten the mild summer days that passed for winter down by the sea in a southern clime.
There was nothing to do—just be. Open. Spacious. Free. Slough off the past.
But she couldn’t.
These places were too charged with resonances of the past—excited molecules bearing negative charges, rutted neural pathways, implicit understandings, explicit emotions—redolent of failures, dead ends, and endless cul-de-sacs. Every corner a lack in her character—a stunted ambition—an opportunity missed.
Then she remembered why she left all those years ago.
But now there was this issue of a first winter day that felt like a mild summer day. Weren’t all winters moving forward going to be mild summers?
A palm tree festooned in Christmas lights.
She reeled herself in and whispered: breathe, just be.
“The language of poetry reminded me to stay alive. It reminded me that, when it felt like I had nothing, I was nothing, I still had words. I could ride language as if on horseback, and it could take me anywhere, including more deeply within myself.”
— Victoria Chang / Dear Memory
thee istsfor manity reader 