13 ways of looking
“IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.”
Once you’ve opened something up, it doesn’t close again. You cannot fold the paper back into the same shape or seal the package quite as tight. This is true of boxes, maps, and poems. It is in the unpacking that we release something new, and once that knowledge is discovered, it cannot be undiscovered. You might pretend your new knowledge doesn’t change the shape of things, but it does.
In the corona, we hear and read about what life will be like “when things go back to normal.” But that normal no longer exists; I’m not sure it ever existed. And there is no “new normal.” I refuse to use that phrase just as I refuse to refer to activities outside the college classroom as the “real world” or use the words trump and president together in reference to the same person. Instead of a new normal, we need new language to describe the post-corona world; words that move us forward rather than words that expect us to replicate what is gone.
All art is an exercise in observation—in capturing what is (consciously or not) perceived by the artist. Poetry makes the ordinary, extraordinary. Every day, poetry takes words we already know about things we always see and rearranges them into startlingly familiar ideas. This is why Pablo Neruda can write “An Ode to my Socks” and William Carlos Williams tells us,
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
Neruda says that beauty is not in admiration but in application—preserving is less valuable than using. Williams acknowledges that poetry doesn’t show us what is going on in the world; it tells us how to survive what is going on in the world.
Poetry lends itself to hard use.
In “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Wallace Stevens dissolves and reconstitutes a blackbird into 13 different observations. Through his vehicle, we have looked at people and tortillas and September 11. His poem makes the ordinary, extraordinary and gives it back to us again. Thirteen times—not an expected and even 10 or a desperate 11 or a beatific 12—13 a number awkward, fearful, and unfortunate; a baker’s dozen I have repurposed for the corona.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Corona (and one poem for seeing the sun)
1.
The corona burned through
what we saw
before
we were blinded, blind-sided.
2.
The year held a particular
balance & clarity
in spite of, because of, until the
corona.
3.
In the quiet, a sweeping
gesture erases plans made
before the corona, for after the corona.
4.
#togetherapart #inthistogether #workingfromhome #coronavirus
5.
Six feet over or under either way, we escape
transmission. Ride the edge
of not touching, just breathing
the invisible blooms of the corona.
6.
A refrain that changes and repeats itself over
itself, a palimpsest of deeply lined stories
you remember. Once upon a time in the corona, a girl
shut away and waiting….
7.
The corona shone, a frowning crescent
on the horizon. We binged and hoarded its light,
sheltered and masked lucidity.
8.
Nothing like the sun, this corona,
though through it people I know
dazzle and glisten, damp with worry
and anticipation.
9.
It will end, the corona. Its searing edge
will burn the dark and space and us.
10.
We shudder in unison at the pounding
feet on the path behind us. Like ants arrowing toward safety
in the collective,
we funnel into the eye of the corona.
11.
I am sorry. I never meant for this to happen. Everything’s
mistaken. No, not mistaken, mistook. Silhouetted
against the corona, I am afraid. I will never be forgiven.
No, not forgiven, forgive.
12.
I catch the second hand tick backward,
just one—perhaps two—hatch marks repeated—
time borrows from itself in the corona.
13.
And finds us here, waiting in place, quarantined—40 days
in the harbor. The morning’s afternoon evenings on
while we, on shore, fall in and out of love, in and out of time;
the numbing indifference of the corona.
Stevens published “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” on New Year’s Day, 1954. I’m not sure there is much difference between 1953 and 1954, but there is a lot of difference between December 31 and January 1. There will be a day when lock-down ends and we wake up to non-quarantine, out-placed, unsheltered—in another space looking at the same place but calling it something else.
Perhaps rather than attempting to name where we are going, we need to look in the other direction and re-name where we’ve been. The Antebellum Period could only find its identity from a post-war vantage.
14.
The halo of the sun, defined and without
outline, its fiery-soft tendrils unfurl and wind,
replacing emptiness with heat. Supple fingers and sleights
of hand trick us into spending what we’ve borrowed: the collateral against another corona.
