Sonnet: Pause

Has stopped the music, keeping each in place

And silences of recesses arise

Pastoral past proposing to our eyes

An easeful pause and human kind of pace

Where sun and shadow on the landscape trace

A subtle tempo as our lives revise

To figure what is now a worthy prize

And bear and bobcat challenge center space.

This quiet we uneasily embrace

And dire circumstances temporize

Anticipated outcomes theorize

The while savings dwindling apace,

But hear the hammer pound the nail --- proof

Of life and said serenity goes poof.

Sonnet: Reworked Reality

Coronavirus novel reigning liege

Obscures the memory of former ways

Amid forgetful fog that serves to ease

Dissociation in these present days,

Perspective shrinks to match the changed routine

Confined to area of a too small room

Dictated by some notion of quarantine

And tempered by ability to zoom.

Less burdened by the past we strain to see

Reworked reality as yet opaque

And suffer so of future anxiety

Like waiting on a said-to-come earthquake,

Each moment seizing every partial clue

We push to birth entire worlds anew.

Sonnet: Patience

And stay-at-home the patience game of siege

The predator without, within the prey

Foretelling hours, days and weeks to squeeze

The spirits used to active work and play,

So flip another card to hope it fit

The sequence auguring a quick release

Reshuffling decks that tell more weeks to sit

And crave your favorite pastime rid of disease.

Beware though hidden cards and sleights of hand

Whose easy wins inflate a false bravado

For unbent dangers in the welcome land

Lay slyer snares than common sense could know,

A reckoning draws nearer to the time

Of placing faith and freedom on the line.

Journal: First Look

I was sequestered two and a half months in my apartment and neighborhood on a San Francisco hill without car or bus service. I had groceries and restaurant meals delivered. When it became obvious things wouldn't go back to normal soon, if ever, I bought a car. 

Journal entry: 21 May 2020

Yesterday was my first extensive tour of the city since the March 17 stay-at-home order. It's pretty grim: businesses boarded up with some attempts at art --- "You're doing good!" says the cartoon bear on the boards at Club Moderne (Taylor & Bush; where the Yong Sang used to be). Other art looked like graffiti but I didn't have time to peruse since I was driving, not riding a bus.

Outside of open restaurants stood masked figures who seemed more scattered than appropriately spaced and who were barred from entering by whatever device ---table, counter, chairs --- the establishment used to effect an obstacle. None of the excluded people were well-dressed nor were expected to be. Before, they would have been overshadowed  by strutting peacocks, clothes horses and the merely beautiful. Now, grim and gritty under the harsh light of a May day.

Maybe 20% of the population was out and of them many wore some sort of masking device ---scarves, proper non-medical masks, but those who didn't appeared defiant to my eyes, or clueless. One couple in their thirties was crossing Union Street at Franklin and seemed amused at the blue dust mask covering my mouth in the cab of my car. They were out for a stroll with no covering device I could see and thinking, possibly, "I'm okay and you're shit." But of the unmasked a set-upon defiance seemed to be the attitude. The woman crossing Sutter at Larkin had a backpack from which a yellow-tipped stick poked. Forty or  fifty years of age, brown frizzy hair, and going who knows where.

A new place opened on the corner of 18th and Collingsworth in the Castro. It's sign read, "El Capitan," a new burrito place where my old favorite, Zapata, used to be. Too bad the landlord wouldn't give Zapata more than a year's lease, causing them to close. My new go-to burrito place, before stay-at-home, is still open I discover. I don't even know its name, but it's across from the Safeway on Church Street and Market near 14th. An impulse told me to stop and patronize them but I checked it: unnecessary exposure is not in order.

Driving around the city was easy now most Ubers were off the street (and stay-at-home, of course). We are allowed to go out for essentials. Construction of a certain kind is deemed essential, and around my neighborhood the sound of sawing, slamming and whatever, have picked up. At Ceasar Chavez and Valencia, the huge old St. Luke's hospital, twenty floors?, is being demolished, a wonder to see: exposed rooms stripped of their walls, reminding me of buildings in Mexico City after the 1985 earthquake.

Some things are as usual: a guy in a wheelchair propelling himself with his feet at Church and Dolores. People are out and about but far from the typical numbers and not at the same time, I guess. Yeah, but those boarded shops aren't coming back soon, nor will the strutting peacocks, the clothes horses or the merely beautiful.

Sonnet: Hand

Make cover-cough and washing hands an art
Refining measures overlooked through use
Invest a precious twenty seconds smart
With soap and water smite corona loose,
The hand the master fabricant whose touch
Draws pleasure or sharp pain to sound alarm:
Extremes of ice and fire but nonesuch
Against the minute virus doing harm.
The index, thumb and pinkie, middle, ring
Unheralded translators of the mind
That cut and shape, smooth and finish, bring
Through discipline great bounty to our kind
But guard an errant pinkie trailing skin
On surfaces that tracks contagion in.


May 2020

Sonnet: Six Feet

Six feet, like strangers, must we stand apart
Uncertain if that someone a spreader be
Of disease who untested could be me !
In bar or restaurant, at beach or park
The chance encounter happens in the dark
As voices meaning and contagion carry
Or buses on a strap or handle see
Corona home to your or my apart-
ment; Hi to selfies, bye the peopled pic
And woe to solitude amid the crowd
Where players of the social distance game
Would keep relations at arm's length and stick
To corners of a shot as none too proud
Now six feet doubled drops them out of f r a m
                                                                              e


April 2020

Sonnet: The Viral Bridge

The viral bridge of you-to-me transaction:
The music videos on internet
Restoke remembrance during this inaction
Of jazzy heat aglow off your sextet,
Where once we met and talked you sang, Deluxe
Club's closed and l'amour's interest shuttered down
And expectation of seeing you more bucks
The timeline reopening the town.
I click and watch you strut across a stage
Your resonating voice a youthful peal
Then later throaty blue as lover's sage
The various facets of your appeal.
Upon a time a man and woman met
Reality though cued a different set.


April 2020

Sonnet: Siege

The curtain drops on social interaction
The viral bridge of you-to-me transaction:
Six feet, like strangers, must we stand apart
Make cover-cough and washing hands an art
And stay-at-home the patience game of siege
Coronavirus novel reigning liege
Has stopped the music, keeping each in place
Until its transit frees us from blind space.

Will millions ordered off the jobs that earn
A livelihood regain them on return
Will children frozen mid-term out of school
Reclaim lost time, friends and scholastic rule
Will neighbors yearning for the curtain's rise
Rejoice at the new world that meets their eyes?

Sonnet: Like a Flower

The consciousness awakens like a flower

A blind nub at onset full of trust

The morrow brings the vital sun and shower

So upward to the sky a green stem thrust

Until the red bud blink an open eye

To see the world it's meant to populate

With silken blossom serve to beautify

Unsought, untainted and fused to wry Fate

Might stay the sun behind a fog obscurant

From loves and lovers jealous of the heart

Who dive regardless into Life's swift current

To swim or drown according to their part.

The heavy mists conceal then lifting show

The pagentry for which the red blooms grow.


2020