What do I do now, that’s human? I eat

(lucky), I sleep (lucky), sometimes I do something like reading—

running my eyes over language like a brush over hair.

I remember skin—another person’s skin—a man’s skin—

Carl’s skin, above the ground,

when he breathed, his skin with its fizz of oxygen in it.

Thinking of him makes me laugh out loud with happiness!

George talked about liking plain words like tree and hill—

when we read the word, the thing appears in our mind.

The words are about themselves, and they are about their appearance in our minds.

This love-note keeps the time of the Monday Poets:

Joe, Matthew, Dorianne, Mike, Major.

I am the one dreaming the five—

I am in time, 5/5,

with my Muriels, my Lucilles, my Ruths, my Gwendolyns, my Galways.

Tomorrow the red-face devil flies over the continent, aiming his pitchfork.

I dare myself to have sex with myself if he loses.

I dare myself to have sex with myself if he wins.

My friends are powers, graces, truths.

And at least I am still only 77.

So many, so many, lost to us so early.

I guess we all lose everyone always, until we are ourselves lost,

but not the ones we make together.

We are a world-wide chorus in quarantine.

Much work to be done.

Quarantine Puzzle

The next morning, I woke up

with a broken thumb. Not the one

I suck, but the other one, now swollen

the color of sackbut and rust.

I went to the smalltown drugstore and said,

May I show my thumb to the doctor?

And he said, I think it is bruised,

but there could be a fair-line hachure. Later in the

day emerged some grape-color, and

gladiola mottle, on my inner

upper arm, and my left knee wasn’t

working either. Meanwhile my sprained

thumb was a lurid pacifier, and the

stain on my elderly-lady crepe

bicep opulent, the surface

like spotted dick or a clayey cream

brûlée. Had I been rolled in a barrel

in the night, without a supervisor?

Had I dreamed, a day early, of the

departure of my guardian angel,

le Carré? What happened last evening? What had

been my liquid refreshment, had I

gone on a Chardonnay roundabout, had I

become a wine roustabout? Now my

thumb is fat as the earthenware teapot’s

cracked spout. I have had my first blackout.

Narcissus in Quarantine

If I were an armadillo, each scale a mirror,

I could represent others instead of myself,

I could reflect multitudes.

If I were a summer horsefly,

I could soar along the wind like a green-armored dragon,

and swoop down and rescue witches from the stake,

singeing some tips of my whiskers like flexible piano-wires.

If I were a window, would I think I was the wind’s eye?

If I were a very bad person,

would I think I was a good person?

If I were a roast,

would I prepare a platter in the presence of my enemies and their