I wrote this in August. The numbers have grown much worse, and we are now in another, possibly more brutal wave.
Fall and All
One out of every 55 people living in the United States has tested positive for COVID-19. More than 6 million in all. 183,000 dead. At least. Experts think it’s higher. // Aug. 31. I imagine William Carlos Williams in his car. On a rural road in North Jersey. The “contagious hospital” in the distance as the flora awakens among the dry and dead remains of the previous year. // I think of the roads here. Fifty miles south. Lined now with houses and stores and empty storefronts. An economy battered by COVID. // On a podcast, the panel discusses Williams’ poem. The imagery. The opening line seems disconnected, they say. Is disconnected from the poem in most readings. // “By the road to the contagious hospital,” Williams writes, before detailing a “scene of life’s rebirth.” This road “the speaker refers to casually as if he’s traveled it often” leads to “a hospital that only a few years earlier would have been filled with victims of the 1918 flu pandemic that killed 675,000 Americans.” // Williams. A doctor. Pediatrician. General practitioner. Was on the front lines then. “We doctors were making up to sixty calls a day. Several of us were knocked out, one of the younger of us died, others caught the thing, and we hadn’t a thing that was effective in checking that potent poison that was sweeping the world.” // I’ve read this poem hundreds of times. Read that opening line over and over. Not fully getting it. Now, I can’t help but reread this poem with a COVID eye. Infections spreading. Death counts rising. // Photo on the Times’ website: “Medics with the Houston Fire Department prepared to transport a patient with coronavirus symptoms to a hospital in Houston earlier this month.” // I want so bad to see the “stark dignity of / entrance” as a “profound change,” as an awakening. But summer ends as it began. With distance and masks. // The sunflowers in our yard droop from the weight of existence. Do they know? Evictions loom for many. Millions out of work. Tempers run hot. It is a grim world. // Yesterday, we drove home from a friend’s in the dark. Past the police station. Past dormant construction sites. // Across from us at a light, diners sat outside under striped umbrellas. “We haven’t gone to dinner yet for our anniversary,” I say to my wife. She nods. We don’t make plans. // “They enter the new world naked,” Williams writes of the new growth pushing up from under the “dead, brown leaves” and “leafless vines.” This is the world today. Even at summer’s end. The shoots rising, “uncertain of all / save that they enter.” And “All about them / the cold, familiar wind.”