Collective Effervescence
It wasn’t the lifeless laptop screen packed with
opaque square frames or off-tinted faces —
the skittish connections — Zooming in for poetry
class — sometimes just a nose or an eyeball
appearing … then vaporizing — all of us so
weary. It wasn’t the boxes of salted chocolate
pinon caramels my son turned up with,
night after night, the sugar buffering my hips,
or the bottles of Bandol rosé I had introduced
him to; it wasn’t his enthusiastic arrival to our patio
most evenings for wine and paprika chicken.
Fearing he might be one of the asymptomatic
he kept his distance so not to kill us. It wasn’t
my hungered for, in-person trips to the store,
armed in purple mask decorated with toothy grin,
green rubber gloves, the collective trauma and
strangeness causing all grocery carts to merge
haphazardly in the snack aisle like iron shavings
to magnets, even as we were trying our best
to maneuver away from each other. It wasn’t the
kindness of curbside pick-up, the quarts of guacamole,
Oaxacan salsas and soft tortillas carefully
placed in the trunk of my car. It wasn’t
even the bristly-coated New Mexico
shepherd dog, his vocabulary increasing
with the abundance of attention. What it was
was the trees, the forest dense with the thick
puzzly-growth of ponderosa bark, that butterscotch
scent; the limber pines in the courtyard, their
branches leaning in to shade; the nectarine full
of her blushing progeny. What it was was the
black widows, nesting individually yet collectively
in the garden shed so that when I opened the door
their plump abdomens shone like black holes
filling with daylight. What it was is what it is,
the Steller’s jays bouncing from mound to mound
of the horse manure we piled around trees in the yard,
white feather markings alongside their beaks like face paint,
their navy crests bounding with effervescence
at discovering seed after seed, worm after worm,
in those decomposing worlds of moist dung.