Quarantine and Isolation

Two and a half years ago, before tests, before PCRs and RATs, I fled my family at the first bout of sneezing and chills, fled to the forest, afraid of what had begun and afraid to drag others down with me. I passed my days in solitude, soon realizing I had overreacted to a little spring allergies, but unable to undo the process I had put in place when I called the hospital where I worked with upper respiratory symptoms and chills in the midst of a new pandemic. It was an abrupt downshift from a frenetic life to a contemplative one. Though I felt guilty for the burdens I shifted onto others, I was deeply grateful for the brief reprieve, for the time I spent in the company of those trees and their inhabitants.

This week, on the other side of the world, I set about testing to prove I had just another cold, only to find I was just another case. I retreated to isolation and found a similar pattern of life emerging, though the shift was less abrupt, my symptoms more debilitating, and my germs more certain. Instead of solitude in the woods by the lake, I floated above the life of my family as they carried on below and brought me sustenance and the light of their laughter. My companions this time have been the wary oystercatchers, the ever-searching gulls, the seal pup so exhausted I mistook it for dead on my daily walk.

In that quarantine two and a half years ago I wrote one of my first poems. This week I wrote another, and I still think of it as one of my first poems. I hope there are more ahead than there are behind. These two poems provide not a beginning and end but, a pair of bookends, surrounding an experience, a period of existence, a pandemic that has not relinquished its ability to unravel our best laid plans and remind us how much we need each other.

Quarantine

The only germs here are my own.

My coughs endanger no one, unless

this hornet berating the glass

is susceptible. If I let it out,

will it unleash an epidemic

on the local hive?

I open the window.

Before quarantine, I would have washed my hands,

sanitized whatever residue

the window handle harbored from other

insect emancipators.

Before, every contact pulsed with

hidden menace.

Every doorknob or elevator button in the

hospital felt perilous.

Every colleague, neighbor, patient, mother,

may carry death on their breath.

Or, I could be the vector of disease.

When I fled from my family

at the first rack of chills and sneezing,

my makeshift mask in place, I dared not

linger, mindful that my wake might be

shimmering with virus. But how was I

to know my daughter, huddled with her brother

in my wife’s arms at the other end

of the hall, would proudly hold up

her origami dinosaur?

The fading light reminds me it’s

probably time for dinner. The single plate

I use for each meal waits patiently

in the sink, unconcerned by its filth,

as I admire the trees—surely more green

than yesterday, each future leaf

erupting with the fervent green of spring.

I forgot my watch at home, but

it hardly matters.

The time will pass, whether I mark it

or not, plodding toward whatever fate

awaits. Either the virus is already

replicating in my cells, exploiting

the very machinery of my life

in service of reproduction, or I

will return to routine, reenter the

rushing river of pandemic, changed

only by having passed these few days

in precious solitude.

Isolation

The virus entered my body

at an unknown moment, unseen,

undetected on that infective breath.

The virus declared its presence quietly at first,

with the proliferating production of mucus,

before it unleashed a sequence of

chills and headache and racking cough and

heartburn so severe it could only be endured

by pacing the floor.

This time, unlike all the times before,

even the day before,

a second band appeared, almost instantaneously, almost as

the pink edge of sample fluid wicked its way

past the dreaded T, a darker band even than the C,

leaving no doubt, and yet

I felt obligated to wait

the prescribed fifteen minutes,

as if the virus would go,

as if it would vacate my cells,

before I picked up my phone to begin

cancelling a week of my life.

Instead it was I who vacated, I

who gathered my toothbrush and

a box of tissues and a water bottle and my laptop and a stack of books and

a bottle of acetaminophen and my ukulele and retreated

upstairs to the vacant bedroom.

After two and half years of caution and vigilance,

two and a half years of doctoring through wave

after wave of this pandemic, I joined the ranks

of the infected, the least exclusive club

on the planet. But I am fortunate—

buttressed by immunizations, I suffer

but do not succumb. I am borne on

breakers of symptoms—the hair-trigger

cough, the fountains of

snot, the hollow ache in the pit

of my stomach. I am suspended

above the flurry of family life in my

haze of expectorated germs, aware of

the abatement of force in each passing wave, awaiting

the next repercussion, sustained

by the food made by my wife, delivered to my bedroom door

by my daughter, with each meal washed up by my son.

And so I sit

on the deck in the afternoon,

shaded by the tin roof

above, and listen to

my wife and daughter plan

and plant our spring garden

in the soil below.

And I put on my mask and go

down the stairs

and down the path

to wade in the sea

so that when my feet emerge

in the morning light

I can feel

the warmth of the sun in my

sand-scattered toes,

grateful

to have caught this

wall of water

just as it reached out

to place its frothy kiss

upon the shore