Latin for Life

A migraine so jasmine that it clings to the cortex

like a floor-length drape that obscures any view

from the window. Copley Square shines barren

of the unmasked, and even they are scant, dispersed

among the traces of spring which begin invisibly,

in the damp smell of earth and the tentative buds 

of silver maples. Am I getting sick? Are you well?

A virus inhabits the gray zone between the animate

and inanimate, spreads unseen from touch, breath,

the very qualities that make us human. “Staying

at home isn’t a personal choice. It’s an ethical duty,”

urges a retweeted headline while I eat my yogurt.

It’s also the purview of the privileged, those of us

who can Zoom from home and still collect a paycheck.

The woman who bagged my groceries, Guatemalan,

is dead. I just read about her in The Boston Globe

and recognize her by her half-smile, by her fingers.

Vitalina Williams was her name and she’s survived

by a husband who could not get close enough to her

in the hospital to say goodbye. He tells the reporter

“nobody’s to blame, and everybody’s to blame.”

She wasn’t given a mask, because there weren’t any.

The man who unloaded pallets of dairy products

from the back of a tractor trailer might be getting

sick and the migrant workers who work on farms

might be exposing themselves to deadly pathogens

so that we can all stay safe. That’s democracy now.

That’s the line between the haves and the have-nots.

There’s a metaphor here, I think, hating myself

for thinking figuratively in the face of literal work.

How a virus attaches to a host cell, then penetrates

to replicate itself until it bursts from the membrane,

killing its host. It’s stunning to see under the eye

of an electron microscope, aesthetically pleasing

even, a haloed Helen Frankenthaler abstraction,

although all I can see in mid-morning’s throbbing

light is Vitalina’s dark eyes and her brown fingers,

meticulously sorting the pasta sauce into one bag

and the eggs into another so that they won’t break.

[submitted on 3/30/2021]