How to Come Out of Lockdown (2022)
Jim Moore
1
Someone will need to forgive me for being
who I am, for sneaking back to my blue chair
by the window, where for the last three hundred and seventy days
I have learned that to be alone is what is good for me. I am pretending
as if I really belong with those who want to return to this world
with open arms, even though it has done to us
what it has done. I wish I could love like that,
instead of wanting to turn my back on it all,
as if life in the world were a marriage
assumed too young and necessarily left behind.
Try as I might I will never become
one of the world’s faithful ones.
My naked face and your naked face,
maskless. A cold March dawn,
harsh sunlight, impersonal and honest,
mindless like the light from a surgeon’s lamp
worn on the forehead as you peer down
into the wound. Nothing in this new life
is asked of me except to remember how small I am.
2
Sometimes the world won’t let itself
be sung. Can’t become a poem. Sometimes
we are sane, but sanity alone is not enough.
Warm moonlight and wind. I am sitting here,
simply breathing because there is no other way
to be with those who no longer can.
I don’t know what to say about it all,
but if you do please show me how to be you.
In the last play I saw, fourteen months ago,
before there were no more plays,
they had made a sea of the stage. Songs were chanted
on its shore. Lives lived. People pretended to die
and a ship sailed into the night. A moon. One star.
Afterward, applause. Then began that long silence
which it is now time for me to admit I have loved
beyond any reason or defense. Who among us
has not seen that star to the left
of the lockdown moon, shining
as the ship sets sail?
--
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